Plenty of products benefit from tight integration, where companies design and sometimes build key components of a product in-house: Apple and its custom microprocessors and Tesla and its Superchargers are two notable examples. It's not an easy strategy to get right, but General Galactic, a stealthy new startup, hopes the approach will let it drive prices down for so-called e-fuels, which produce hydrocarbons from captured carbon dioxide, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The company was born out of co-founder and CEO Halen Mattison's time at SpaceX. 'I was working on a team that was focused on propellant generation for Starship. I started to think, 'Hey, what are we going to do when we get to Mars' How are we going to produce fuel to come home''' Mattison urged SpaceX to tackle the problem, but it was too tangential to the company's goals at the time, he said. Around that time, he was also leaving SpaceX to attend grad school at Stanford. There, he met Luke Neise, and the two...
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