- I'm Dr. Dave Stuckenberg.
I am the chief operations officer at Genesis Systems
and one of the inventors of this really cool technology
called the WaterCube,
which is a black box that makes a water supply from the air.
So what's truly dynamic about Genesis WaterCube
is that this simple box can create up to 26 gallons of water
a day from the humidity,
and that's water you no longer have to carry with you
wherever you're going.
And what's versatile about the system
is that it has various electrical outlets
and abilities to connect to a vehicle battery system,
or to operate off of DC power from a single solar panel,
or even into a conventional generator.
So it's exceptionally versatile
in the way you can provide energy to it.
Heretofore, you had to either carry water
into a combat operations area
or into a disaster recovery area,
and that's no longer a requirement.
And so what you do is you free tonnage, right?
That would ordinarily be transported onto a ship
or maybe an aircraft.
And once you turn it on,
and we're making water right now from the air
in Tampa, Florida, here at SOF Week,
you make potable water that can even operate
in a contested environment such as a chemical,
biological, radiological, or nuclear environment
where contaminants have entered the air.
So we can even purify those out.
This system is combat-hardened,
so it is able to withstand an EMP,
an electromagnetic pulse,
and you can't hack into it either,
because it can operate either analog or digital via SAT.
If you operate it via SAT,
the links are impenetrable
because they can be encrypted
with post-quantum encryption for many, many years,
in fact, probably more than 25.
DARPA and other agencies have been looking
at how to develop, you know,
basically an efficient system
that made enough water to be valuable in combat.
And so one of the breakthroughs that Genesis had
is actually heat management and how to manage
what we would call the latent heat of evaporation,
or condensation, within our system.
And so there are many different technology suites.
The company has about 70 patents, seven-zero,
on all the different technologies we use.
And putting those together in a system of systems
that creates a combat-ready product
that can't be interrupted by cyber,
electromagnetic spectrum interruptions,
or even chemical, biological,
or radiological, or nuclear problems,
it will still make clean water
no matter what kinda what's thrown at it.
That creates a new class of infrastructure
called an uninterruptible water system.
And so the journey started off 9 1/2 years ago.
I was actually flying combat missions
at Al Udeid Air Base on OEF/OYAF,
and I noticed that there were tanker trucks
pulling water out of the last aquifer in Qatar.
And that concerned me because of the centralization
of all the water supplies across the Middle East.
They support about 66 million people.
And if you had an interruption to those,
you've created a big problem very quickly.
So we began sharing this idea,
then in concept,
with the Department of Defense,
and it got backing and traction really immediately.
SBIR programs were put into action,
and funding was brought online.
And so as we kind of went through creating
this dual-use technology for the warfighter version,
we passed through all the gates.
And kinda one of the final gates was a program called TACFI.
And that's tactical financing.
The Air Force partnered with private investment
to come together and actually say,
"All right, let's buy a bunch of these
and send them out into the unit for the final field trial."
And so a unit was provided,
six of the WaterCubes,
and these are the small ones,
the WaterCube 10s.
And they were also provided larger systems
that make 100 to 200 gallons a day.
And when those units were equipped,
they got ready to go out to the Pacific,
and were actually turned and sent the other way
to the Middle East-North Africa region and U.S. CENTCOM.
And what we know now is,
this happened just weeks ago,
Operation Epic Fury kicked off,
and that unit going into a routine deployment
found itself in a fight to maintain mission readiness,
and their water supply was interrupted,
and they sustained themselves
with the WaterCube water systems.
And so this was a first combat test
and proof of concept ever done with the technology.
And the unit had no idea that that was gonna happen.
And it was almost pure luck.
But the after-action reports went back to the Pentagon,
and they said, "This thing worked.
It provided us the ability to keep going."
And just two hours old now,
we've received the news
that the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense
has awarded units around the world
the ability to buy up to $10.5 million
of the WaterCube systems
for their individual needs this year.
The next stop is to drop it from airplanes
and really shake, rattle and roll,
and then to get this into a military program of record.