The Alchemical Origins of Deep Tech in Commercial Space: Or, Happy Birthday Isaac Newton!

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

This week, on January 4th, we celebrated the birthday of perhaps the greatest scientific mind to ever grace the Earth, Sir Isaac Newton (Neil DeGrasse Tyson says he is, so I’m going with that.) And that means it's that time of year to revisit my favorite fun fact about Newton. This giant of science, icon of rational thought, and progenitor of the theory of gravitation and the discipline of calculus, was also an alchemist. That's right, he was into some woo-woo, mystical stuff. In fact, some historians believe he may have suffered a mental break after enduring gradual mercury poisoning from his many attempts to turn quicksilver (literal mercury) into gold: the elusive premier quest of alchemists seeking the Philosopher's Stone.

But it's hard to blame Newton. After all, when he was around, science and magic must have seemed imperceptible in their differences. Alchemy wasn't considered a bizarre precursor to science as we understand it today, but was integrally linked to and an animating force of it. In fact, many great minds we now claim for science, such as Robert Boyle and Roger Bacon, could also be placed in the alchemist's camp.

But this is where things get interesting. Because maybe it wasn't just in the late 1600s and early 1700s when science and magic seemed one and the same. In fact, maybe that's still the case today. Indeed, it might be safe to say that the practices of alchemy, long relegated to the sidelines of science (or as I like to call it, witchcraft for boys), have a subtle, surprising, but firm footing in the modern deep tech ecosystem of today. After all, as Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, once posited: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

And since we're talking about a Space Odyssey, we might as well focus our deep tech lens on those most magical of all scientific applications: the space industry. So here are three modern-day, space-based deep tech concepts with surprising alchemical origins, along with some of the most exciting startups today that are moving these concepts forward.

Hermetic Sealing: Keeping the Pure In and the Impure Out

If you've ever opened up a can of soup, you've benefited from hermetic sealing. But hermetic sealing goes far beyond soup (as much as I love soup). It's a foundational process for dozens of industries and technologies. Hermetic sealing protects microchips from damage, prevents nuclear reactors from uncontrolled meltdowns, slows degradation in medical implants, and ensures continuous connectivity for highly sensitive military communication equipment. That's because hermetic sealing is the process of creating an airtight, leak-proof enclosure to protect contents from contaminants like moisture and gases.

But for as modern as all these applications are, the origins of hermetic sealing (as well as the very name) are decidedly alchemical. Why do we call it hermetic sealing? To understand that, you must trace the origins all the way back to the beginnings of alchemy itself, with its mythical founder, Hermes Trismegistus. Several important alchemical texts are attributed to him (including the Emerald Tablet, which drove much of Western esoteric thought from the 7th century onward). Whether he was based on a real figure or served only as a legend, Hermes Trigemestus eventually took the form of a mashup of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. With Hermes being the god of secrets (long before Regina George's hair took the crown) and Thoth being the god of learning, it's clear why HT was revered, or concocted, by the alchemists, whose whole aim was to discover knowledge and keep it secret.

One of the core beliefs of the alchemists was that life was a constant quest to remove contamination and impurities and become pure. It was both a spiritual and a physical transformational practice. The alchemists claimed that Hermes Trismegistus invented the idea of making a glass tube airtight using a secret seal, called the "Seal of Hermes," that kept the impure "out" and left the pure "in." Maybe this was understood as spiritual or metaphysical at some point (such as in Roger Bacon's time around the 1200s), but it quickly became very much literal. The alchemists embraced the use of airtight containers in their distillation techniques to achieve pure gold and eliminate impurities.

Hermetic Sealing in Modern Space Applications

We may no longer be trying to create gold through transmutation, but a number of deep tech startups still incorporate hermetic sealing into their processes. In the world of space, hermetic sealing is absolutely crucial. Space electronics face some of the harshest conditions imaginable, from extreme temperature swings to radiation bombardment to the vacuum of space itself. Hermetic sealing creates airtight barriers across circuits, sensors, ignitors, switches, microchips, and semiconductors.

One company putting hermetic sealing to innovative use is Lonestar Data Holdings, which is building data centers in space. (Oooh, I know, I brought it up. Yikes! For those who don’t obsess over space drama, data centers in space and their technical feasibility dominate the discourse as of early 2026.) Anyway, Lonestar is developing lunar data centers that will use hermetic sealing in their hardware, as the equipment must be robust enough to operate under the Moon's extreme environmental conditions. Their approach involves hardware designed to operate in space, where the equipment must be sealed to protect sensitive components from the vacuum, radiation, and temperature fluctuations.

Lonestar's initial payload, a proof-of-concept mission, was launched to the Moon in early 2024 on an Intuitive Machines lander. They may not go around actively advertising that their equipment is sealed and protected with a technology first whispered about in incantations in medieval times, but we can, of course, be satisfied with this knowledge for ourselves. 

Phosphorus: The Light-Bearer Born from Alchemy

The chemical element phosphorus holds the unique distinction of being the first to be "discovered,” that is, it wasn't readily available in nature and therefore wasn't known in ancient times. And the man we have to thank for this discovery is, I'm sure you guessed it, an alchemist.

German alchemist Hennig Brand (or Brandt) discovered the element phosphorus in Hamburg, Germany, in 1669, quite by accident while trying to find the Philosopher's Stone. (Did I mention pretty much every alchemist was obsessed with discovering the Philosopher's Stone?) He discovered it through, shall we say, an unusual method: boiling down large quantities of human urine. Now look, this may seem disgusting to us today, but considering that ancient Romans used human urine as a teeth whitener, I’d consider Henning’s method a step up. Neither here nor there, this rather unpleasant process yielded a waxy, glowing substance he named phosphorus, from the Greek word meaning "light-bearer." The glow came from the element's chemiluminescence, meaning it literally glowed in the dark when exposed to air.

This was Hening’s eureka moment…or rather his urine-eka moment? (I’m sorry, I'm really sorry.) While he never found his Philosopher's Stone, he found something arguably more valuable: a new building block of matter that would prove essential to life itself and, centuries later, to cutting-edge technology.

Black Phosphorus: From Medieval Urine to Modern Space Communications

Fast forward to today, and a specialized form of phosphorus is revolutionizing space communications: Black phosphorus.

Other than having a name that sounds like it came straight out of an alchemic textbook, black phosphorus is a two-dimensional material with some remarkable properties. It differs from the kind of phosphorus mentioned above, white phosphorus, because it’s been highly pressured and, to use the technical term, super-squeezed into a 2D shape, similar to graphene. This makes its bandgap (the energy required to move electrons) change with the number of layers, allowing it to absorb and emit light across the visible to infrared ranges, crucial for optical communication. Also, unlike some semiconductors, black phosphorus has a direct bandgap, which means it can efficiently convert electrical signals to light (in lasers and LEDs) and vice versa (in photodetectors) on a single chip. 

All these fancy properties make the applications for space and RF communications pretty exciting. Black phosphorus-based inks enable advanced mid-wave infrared sensors for gas detection and spectral imaging, helpful for understanding the chemical composition of planets, and they integrate seamlessly with silicon, making them ideal for use in space-based chips. (Fun fact, speaking of space chips, did you know potato chips are absolutely banned on the ISS because of the crumbs they create? Not good for zero gravity.) Anyway, perhaps most importantly, black phosphorus's versatility enables single-material, high-speed optical transmitters, receivers, and modulators on a single chip, enabling dramatic miniaturization and a significant reduction in the size, weight, and power consumption of satellites. (Reducing all of three of those parameters is sort of like the new Philosopher's Stone when it comes to space launches.)

An exciting company in this space is Iris Light Technologies, a spinout of Argonne National Laboratory. They are developing specialized "photonic inks" containing black phosphorus and other materials that can be printed directly onto silicon wafers. In collaboration with institutions like Boise State University and the Air Force Research Laboratory, Iris Light is working to synthesize high-quality black phosphorus cheaply by placing active components, such as lasers and detectors, directly onto passive silicon photonics chips, replacing the expensive, bulky external lasers currently required. And when I say expensive, I mean expensive. Currently, black phosphorus production costs can approach 10 times the price of gold (If someone had told Newton to get in on black phosphorus instead of gold, who knows where we’d be today?)

In 2023, Iris Light was accepted into the Techstars Space Accelerator. While it's still too early to say whether they will be appearing on any satellites anytime soon, if they manage it, the overall cost of getting sensors that help humans up in space will go way down.  And then the only urine we’ll have to worry about is that of astronauts.

Boyle's Law: From Corpuscles to Kinetic Launch

If you go back to your high school chemistry class, you may have vague memories of watching a marshmallow grow and shrink in a syringe based on whether the plunger was pushed down or up. (Or was that just my chemistry teacher's way of getting rid of her camping food stores after summer break?) Anyway, this is an easy way to visualize Boyle's Law, which describes the inverse relationship between the pressure and volume of a gas at a constant temperature: as pressure increases, volume decreases, and vice versa.

Hold on. You might be thinking to yourself, that sounds quite modern. We learned it in chemistry class! And you'd be right. Boyle's Law is very much a modern concept, but as you are probably picking up, this modern concept has some downright medieval origins. 

Robert Boyle sits at an interesting nexus on the spectrum from alchemy to science. He’s closer to science than Roger Bacon, but further from it than perhaps a Lavoisier. And I think it's safe to say Boyle was responsible for much of that shift from the mystical to the methodical, but that doesn't mean alchemy didn't still influence him.

Boyle’s experiments with gases that led to the development of our understanding of molecules and atoms were inspired by the writings of Islamic alchemist classically known as Geber (or in Arabic, Jābir ibn Ḥayyān. Much of early alchemy, and indeed the very word itself, owe their existence to the Arabic scholars who kept science alive after the decline of the Classical world.) Geber, who may or may have been one person or many people who all wrote under a pseudonym, was active in the 700s. Before him, or them, the prevailing belief around matter was nearly a sacrosanct ideology developed by Aristotle. In Aristotelian belief, all matter was composed of four base elements: fire, water, earth, and air. Everything in the universe was in some way a manifestation of these four elements, and they were continuous and whole at their core (not able to be split or divided further.) 

But Geber, darned alchemist that he was, was dead set on unveiling the Philosopher's Stone, and in his quest to get metal to change from one form to another, surmised that matter was not in fact composed of four immutable elements, but numerous individual discrete units. Geber proposed that each thing's specific arrangement is what made it what it was (you can see where this is going) and that humans could actually change these arrangements. Another fun fact: the way Geber proposed arranging these units was through the Arabic al-iksir, which roughly translates to "medicinal powder" and is where we get our word elixir. 

Boyle took these alchemical ideas about invisible particles and transformed them into a more rigorous, experimental framework. While, wouldn’t you believe, ALSO trying to discover the Philosopher's Stone, Boyle put Geber’s concepts to the test, refining them into what became known as corpuscular theory. (A horrid phrase, but whatever.)  Corpuscular theory rejected some of the more mystical elements of Geber’s ideas and proposed that these discrete units, now called corpuscules, could be controlled and understood through mechanics and mathematics. 

Corpuscular theory was refined even further and soon became the basis of atomic theory, which accurately predicted and described the behavior of the molecules Boyle studied in his experiments. 

From Ancient Corpuscles to…SPACE GUNS!!!!?

Today, Boyle's Law is crucial in aerospace engineering for designing pressurized cabins, understanding physiological effects (why your ears and sinuses hurt on planes…truly the worst), and calculating fuel combustion in rockets. But perhaps one of the most innovative applications comes from Longshot Space Technologies, which is using these principles in a completely novel way: a pneumatic launch system that could revolutionize access to space.

Longshot Space uses a kinetic launch approach to launch payloads to orbit. You might have read that casually. Let me try again. Longshot Spaces uses a GIANT FREAKING SPACE GUN for launching stuff into space. The system works by injecting bursts of high-pressure gas into a launch tube. A projectile with a long, angled tail catches this gas, and the gas's pressure on the tail squeezes it down the barrel, accelerating it to hypersonic speeds (kinda like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube, but at velocities approaching orbital speed.) The system uses controlled bursts of gas released through precisely timed burst disks, demonstrating incredibly precise pressure management based on gas laws.

The physics at work here are a direct application of Boyle's principles about gas behavior under changing pressure and volume. As the high-pressure gas expands behind the projectile, it does work on the projectile, accelerating it. The controlled release of gas through burst disks allows for staged acceleration, similar to a multi-stage rocket but using compressed gas instead of chemical combustion. The entire system relies on understanding how gases behave under extreme pressures and how that pressure can be harnessed to do mechanical work. And as we know by now, these are concepts that trace their lineage back through Boyle to the alchemical corpuscular theories of Geber. (If I have to write corpuscular again, I might puke.)

The Alchemy of Innovation

While we may have gotten away from the mystical and spiritual side of science with the gradual development of the scientific method, I’d argue that the natural world is still full of hidden mysteries, and our attempts to understand, manipulate, and benefit from those mysteries are just as magical, and dare I say even alchemical, as ever. (And look, the desire for profit and being able to “print gold” is just as replete now in scientific progress as it was back then, too.)

In my lifetime, I’ve gone from sitting in giant gas-guzzling cars to being chauffeured around by a self-driving electric vehicle. I’ve gone from waiting for my mom to stop using the phone so I could get on the internet to having a tiny internet-connected chatbot in my pocket that has access to all the knowledge that’s pretty much ever been published ever. And I’ve gone from humans launching rockets to space approximately 25 times per quarter when I was born to now, a rocket launch happening almost every single day. 

Just as with the alchemists, we’ve gotten some stuff wrong. And some stuff, not even remotely close. But there is so much we, just as they, have gotten right, and thanks to the work being done today, humans generations from now will likely benefit and create advancement far beyond what we can ever even imagine. And, in honor of our favorite alchemist-come-scientist, Isaac Newton, human knowledge advances because we all “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Happy belated birthday, Big I.