MUNICH, Dec. 16, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Proxima Fusion today announced that Barrington "Baz" D'Arcy has joined the company as Chief Manufacturing Officer. D'Arcy brings a wealth of experience in scaling advanced manufacturing processes, having previously held leadership roles at BMW, SpaceX and CMR Surgical.
Tasked to adopt lessons learned from BMW to the delivery of rockets, Baz joined SpaceX in 2013 as Manufacturing Engineering Director. During his tenure, he led the ramping up of rocket production, and by the time he departed as Senior Production Director in 2020, SpaceX had launched its hundredth mission and broken its own yearly record with twenty-six missions per year.
At Proxima Fusion, D'Arcy will lead the charge to develop and scale the complex manufacturing systems required to build stellarator fusion power plants. This will begin with achieving a critical milestone on the company's path to putting the world's first stellarator fusion power plant on the grid in the coming decade: the development of high-temperature superconducting (HTS) high-field magnets.
Earlier this year, Proxima entered into a long-term collaboration framework with the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) to design, manufacture, and test large-scale HTS magnets for stellarator fusion devices. These magnets will have a far higher magnetic field than the coils of Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), the world's most advanced stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), whose record-breaking achievements Proxima is building on.
Proxima's demonstration magnet, the Stellarator Model Coil (SMC), will de-risk HTS technology for stellarators in 2027-paving the way for the company's demonstration stellarator, Proxima Alpha, which will demonstrate net fusion energy in steady-state for the first time in 2031.
"Our ambitious timeline to make commercial fusion a reality requires a world-class team capable of moving fast. Baz's track record speaks for itself," said Proxima Co-Founder and CEO Francesco Sciortino. "From scaling rocket production at SpaceX to pioneering medical robotics manufacturing at CMR Surgical, Baz has consistently delivered in some of the most demanding industries in the world, and will now accelerate our work to bring fusion down to Earth. With Baz on board, we will leverage capabilities from across the European industrial ecosystem to assemble the manufacturing excellence needed to power Europe's energy transformation."
"Joining Proxima Fusion is an opportunity unlike any other," said D'Arcy. "My experience at BMW, SpaceX and CMR Surgical taught me how to apply manufacturing to new frontiers, and I'm excited to take those lessons to an even higher level here at Proxima. We're not just building stellarators-we're building the future of clean energy."
About Proxima Fusion
Proxima Fusion spun out of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in 2023 and has since worked in public-private partnership with IPP to further expand the physics and engineering basis to build the first generation of fusion power plants using quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarators. Proxima's simulation-driven engineering approach leverages advanced computing and high-temperature superconductors to build on the ground-breaking results of the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) experiment.
Contact
Whitney Milam
press@proximafusion.com
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