Sascha Deri ’93 works to make a greener, more thoughtful vision of space entrepreneurship a reality.
On a rainy November day, Sascha Deri ’93 aimed his pickup truck through deep mud holes and across long-neglected swathes of land on a former military airport near the coast of Maine.
His destination? A rough cinder block enclosure tucked into a remote corner of the runway that looks nondescript until you learn what happens there:
rocket science.
Deri is the founder and CEO of bluShift Aerospace, a Brunswick, Maine-based startup focused on developing rocket technology. Two years ago, it was the first in the world to launch a commercial, suborbital rocket powered by carbon-neutral biofuel — a closely guarded formula he developed a decade ago.
A few months after his visit to the cinder block enclosure in November of last year, the old airbase became the site of a critical test for the company. If all goes well, the test will show that bluShift’s latest engine prototype can successfully ignite and burn for a full 60 seconds, the amount of time needed to launch a rocket through the stratosphere and deploy satellites into space.
From there, the physics major believes the sky’s the limit.
“I want to do something with technology that benefits humanity on our planet in some way,” Deri said. “It seems like it’s a good thing to found a company on — doing space in a more sustainable way.”
Still, it’s an uphill climb. Maine, a state known more for tourism than for tech, seems an unlikely locale for a company engaged in a modern-day space race. And Deri, a quirky visionary who once ate a chunk of his solid-state rocket fuel on CNN to prove it could be done, is not your typical space entrepreneur.
But the universe is vast, and if there’s room in it for space-minded billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, why isn’t there a place for an everyday idealist like Deri?
He is betting there is and that a greener, more thoughtful vision of space entrepreneurship and travel can take root and grow in his home state. Other people think so, too.
Robert Bayer, the emeritus director of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine and the research director for a small startup called Lobster Unlimited, was excited to learn about Deri’s environmentally friendly rocket fuel. So excited, in fact, that he ran a trial at his home to assure Mainers that the secret substance would not harm the state’s all-important lobster industry.
He set up a fish tank in his basement, filled it with sea- water and installed a live lobster before adding some of the fuel to the tank.
“I kept it for two weeks — the lobster that was in the tank was happy, and so was I. You couldn’t ask for anything much safer than this,” Bayer said. “I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you that it’s safe and that you have eaten some of this at some point in your life.”
There’s an extra bonus that comes with Deri doing this work in the state where he grew up.
“Sascha’s really pushing the envelope within the industry itself,” said Terry Shehata, longtime executive director of the nonprofit Maine Space Grant Consortium and interim director of the public-private Maine Space Corporation.
“And he never forgot where he’s from. We’re glad that he wanted to come home and give back to the community.”
From Maine to the stars
In some ways, Maine is a great place to start a space company. In 2022, Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill into law that established Maine Space Corp., a public-private partnership aimed at establishing the state as a U.S. space industry leader. The potential seems as vast as space, with the American government estimating in 2021 that the U.S. space industry accounted for more than $200 billion of gross output and 360,000 private industry jobs.
Deri is a member of the board of directors for Maine Space Corp., and has been a tireless ambassador for the state’s space economy, according to Shehata.
He’s out there all the time, speaking on behalf not only of his company and the corporation, but also sending a message that Maine is really ready to participate in a big way in the growing space economy,” Shehata said.
The group has targeted 2030 as the year Maine will be seen as an integral player in the emerging global network of suborbital and orbital transportation to space. The biggest reason for that is the state’s geography, Deri said. Because Maine juts into the Atlantic Ocean, companies such as bluShift will be able to safely launch rockets without going over land and houses — one of very few places on the crowded eastern seaboard where that is possible.
He anticipates that a few years, bluShift, which now employs nine people, will regularly launch rockets from a liftboat anchored two nautical miles off the coast of Steuben in the heart of the region known as Downeast Maine. Much smaller than the rockets built by SpaceX, the bluShift fleet will fill an important role by sending smaller satellites developed by businesses, researchers and students into a polar orbit that circles the earth by soaring high over the eastern seaboard.
Those smaller satellites will make space research accessible to more people.
“Short-term hope, we’d like to provide researchers, including students, the ability to access space quickly and cost-effectively,” he said.
Eyes on the skies
Deri has turned his gaze skyward since he was a boy, growing up in an off-grid homestead tucked amid the forests and lakes of East Orland in Maine’s rural Hancock County. When he was 3 and his younger brother Justin Deri ’95 was 1, their parents moved there from Cleveland, Ohio, in search of a simpler, safer way of life.
They didn’t have much in the way of amenities. Early on, the family lived in a wooden cabin that lacked proper insulation and indoor plumbing. At night, there wasn’t much to separate them from the stars.
In some ways, Maine is a great place to start a space company. In 2022, Gov. Janet Mills signed a bill into law that established Maine Space Corp., a public-private partnership aimed at establishing the state as a U.S. space industry leader. The potential seems as vast as space, with the American government estimating in 2021 that the U.S. space industry accounted for more than $200 billion of gross output and 360,000 private industry jobs.
Deri is a member of the board of directors for Maine Space Corp., and has been a tireless ambassador for the state’s space economy, according to Shehata.
“He’s out there all the time, speaking on behalf not only of his company and the corporation, but also sending a message that Maine is really ready to participate in a big way in the growing space economy,” Shehata said.
The group has targeted 2030 as the year Maine will be seen as an integral player in the emerging global network of suborbital and orbital transportation to space. The biggest reason for that is the state’s geography, Deri said. Because Maine juts into the Atlantic Ocean, companies such as bluShift will be able to safely launch rockets without going over land and houses — one of very few places on the crowded eastern seaboard where that is possible.
“The origin of bluShift kind of comes from growing up in Maine,” Deri, 52, said. “You could very clearly see the stars at night, and the Milky Way, especially in the wintertime. And we lived on a lake, so you really had this big open space where you could see the universe.”
All those stars and all that mystery caught his imagination. Space seemed alluring and inevitable, a not-uncommon sentiment for many of the children who grew up in the 1970s. Astronauts had walked on the moon, and the future of space exploration seemed bright.
“You have this vision, because you’ve seen all these books, and you’ve watched Battlestar Galactica and the Star Wars movies, you just know you’re going to space in the next decade or two. It’s happening. We’re just around the corner,” he remembered thinking. “So you come with this pumped-up expectation for what we’re going to do as a race of living beings.”
Of course, that’s not what happened. America’s appetite for space exploration took a nose-dive after the 1986 Challenger explosion killed all seven crew members. The tragedy brought the U.S. space program to an abrupt halt that lasted almost three years.
For Deri, further space-related disappointments were in store. As a boy, he wanted to be an astronaut, then a pilot, then an aerospace engineer. Bad vision and parental persuasion put an end to those dreams.
“I thought, OK, I want to understand how the universe works and that’s why I got into physics,” he said. “But my roots were that I always wanted to do space as a kid.”
College days
Deri was drawn to Earlham College by its academics, small size, roots and values. Raised by a Quaker mother and a father who had been a member of Students for a Democratic Society, he felt the Earlham ethos was the right fit.
“The Quaker philosophy was really tuned in very much to my own sort of belief system,” he said. “My desire wasn’t just purely the sciences. My desire was to learn and grow as a person.”
He loved how, as a student enrolled in a science program, he took lots of humanities classes and met people from all around the globe. “You’re getting your eyes open to the rest of the world just a little bit. I think that kind of solidified my desire to align my passions and my belief in my internal moral guidance system,” he said.
He also found time to goof around. One of his most cherished memories happened when he and friends from the physics department employed a three-man slingshot to see how far water balloons would travel. They went up to the roof of the science building, to which Deri happened to have a key, and lobbed their barrage of balloons across the Heart and all the way to Earlham Hall.
“You could hear people yelling, wondering where the heck they were coming from. That caused a bit of calamity,” Deri said. “And then being good Earlham students, you cannot tell a lie. Truth is one of the Quaker testimonies, and you have to be truthful. So when it eventually came around to who did it, we had to let on.”
As a consequence, he forfeited his key.
“It was a good learning lesson,” he said. “And it was a heck of a lot of fun.”
While Deri’s pranks are fun to recall, other aspects of his Earlham experience had a deep impact on his life decisions, especially the quantum mechanics class he took with John Howell, research professor emeritus of physics. The class, which looked at matter and energy at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles, was very abstract. It was a challenge for what Deri calls his “3D mind,” and ultimately changed his path.
“I had thought I was going to be a nutty professor,” he said. “I ended up not going that route. I knew I wanted to go into electrical engineering in part because of quantum physics.”
An entrepreneurial spirit
After Earlham, Deri’s trajectory was not precisely linear. He went on to get another bachelor’s degree, this one in electrical engineering from the University of Southern Maine, and was hired to be a software programmer. “Which I detested,” he said.
After that, he worked as a test engineer for a telecom manufacturing company, which he found to be more tangible and enjoyable than software programming. But it still didn’t fill his cup.
Thanks in part to his upbringing as the son of a jack-of- all-trades who worked as a machinist, a mechanic, a teacher, a carpenter, a kelp fisherman and a woodcutter, among other professions, Deri had a willingness to try new things.
“I think that kind of created the entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. “I’ve also got the bug of taking risks where I think a lot of people feel really timid about taking risks.”
In 1999, he and some partners founded a renewable energy startup, the Boxborough, Massachusetts-based altE store, which specialized in providing do-it-yourself customers with off-grid and grid-tied solar power systems.
The company thrived. But Deri’s dream of space continued to orbit inside him: “My passion for space and my frustration that humanity really hasn’t done anything was always mounting and mounting. So I said, ‘Well, I’m sort of independently capable. Why don’t I just kick off and start doing something myself?’”
Open to the moment
Deri read every book and paper he could find on propulsion systems, rocket technologies and more. He quickly focused his attention on the type of propulsion system that bluShift is building today: a hybrid rocket system that uses both solid and gas or liquid propellants.
“They’re safer and lower cost to build, and you could do them without using really toxic materials, which tends to be the case with normal rockets,” he said.
His curiosity lit, Deri began what he called a “skunk-works,” an innovative side laboratory, to become more familiarized with hybrid rocket engines. He was doing an engine test on his brother’s organic farm in North Yarmouth, Maine, when he made a discovery.
“We sat at his kitchen table on the farm, and we saw a certain substance growing on the windowsill,” Deri said. “I was like, ‘Man, I wonder if that could be used as fuel instead?’ Even if this doesn’t work as well as the petroleum version, it’s more sustainable.”
So far, he said, the plant-derived substance, which he has not publicly identified, exceeded expectations and works even better than petroleum-based fuels.
“It was serendipity, right? You want to think that discovery is part of a high level of academic intelligence,” he said. “But it’s also really about being open to the moment and trying to connect things with possibility, and being willing to experiment and veer off the path, which I think is part of the entrepreneurial spirit. Like being able to take risks, and jump, and find out and be OK with being wrong.”
That spirit infuses bluShift, a company built on the dream of developing a rocket that uses carbon-neutral biofuel to ultimately send a probe toward the next closest star system. It also will allow Deri to meet tough challenges including finding financing and persuading wary environmentalists that the rockets will not harm the Maine coast.
“I want to provide young, rural students like myself with the sense that the world, if not the universe, is your oyster,” he said. “Just because you grew up rurally, and you didn’t have much, you can do incredible things if you put your mind to it and you put your persistence to it.”
Deri knows that’s true. After all, the boy who gazed up at the stars never gave up on space, the universe or doing good in the world. ■
Story written by Abigail Curtis. Photos courtesy of Sascha Deri.