On an unremarkable Sunday afternoon in August 2021, our Chief Strategy Officer, Debbie Calahan, was co-lead for the National Ignition Facility Ignition Campaign and waiting around. Then, the shot went off. The shot that would change history. Debbie’s lab phone, personal phone, and email exploded. She jumped on a call with her team, and they looked at each other. They had just achieved scientific ignition, a goal they had been trying to achieve their whole careers, and now it happened. In that moment as the shock, awe, and slow realization began to spread, Debbie knew two things. She knew the world would never be the same and she had to get a tattoo.

Across the world in Germany, Professor Dr. Markus Roth, a renowned physicist whose work on laser-driven fusion was fundamental to this achievement, and Thomas Forner, an entrepreneur who immediately recognized the importance of this achievement and was committed to bringing affordable, abundant, and clean energy to the world, began meeting. Less than two weeks after Debbie’s team achieved scientific ignition, Tom and Markus announced the launch of Focused Energy, a laser fusion company building on the breakthrough at NIF.

Tom and Markus’ conviction was straightforward: the hard science was done. NIF had proven that fusion ignition was possible. What remained was an engineering problem and engineering problems can be solved. Fusion would be commercialized. The world on the other side of that achievement would be fundamentally different.

Since that fateful day, Tom and Markus grew Focused Energy from just an idea on a piece of paper to the world’s leading laser fusion company with 150+ of the foremost scientific and engineering minds from around the globe. Debbie soon joined and got that tattoo, commemorating scientific ignition. We are now trying to convince her and Markus to get a tattoo of the first laser fusion plant when we begin bringing fusion energy to the grid.