“Everything we do is about pushing a spaceship forward and not generating sustainable grid power,” he explained. Helicity’s main differentiator, according to Lintner, is that they are squarely focused on fusion propulsion, rather than fusion for terrestrial applications. The Pasadena-based company managed to attract funding from a notable group: Airbus Ventures, the VC arm of the major European aerospace giant TRE Advisors Voyager Space Holdings, which is behind the Starlab commercial space station space firm E2MC Space Urania Ventures and Gaingels. “Fusion is a tainted field and we had to really be certain first before raising VC capital that we were ready for it.” Helicity spent several years in stealth, “dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s in terms of what we could do,” Lintner explained in a recent interview. The project is the brainchild of plasma physicist and Helicity co-founder Setthivoine You he and the other two co-founders, CEO and former banker Stephane Lintner and former Boeing-Rocketdyne executive Marta Calvo formalized the business in 2018. The startup says that they have discovered a way to use plasma jets for fusion reaction.

That technology is fusion propulsion, which has long been the domain of science fiction. Helicity Space has closed a $5 million seed funding to accelerate development of a technology that could finally unlock fast, efficient travel in deep space.

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