SpaceX Rocket Battery Engineer Taps Pasadena Base for AI Data Center Role

The engineer who designed the batteries that carried astronauts into orbit now works from a suite on South Lake Avenue — and his next challenge has nothing to do with space.

Porter Harris, founder and managing partner of Pasadena-based Aeonix Studio, has been appointed to the Advisory Council of VivoPower PLC, a Nasdaq-listed company building AI data center infrastructure across the Nordics, the Middle East, and Western Europe.

VivoPower announced the appointment June 2 in a press release, saying Harris will advise the company on power systems, battery storage, and thermal management for its growing network of data centers.

Harris spent more than two decades in battery engineering, most notably as the lead battery responsible engineer at SpaceX, where his team developed the battery systems for the Falcon 9 rocket, the Cargo Dragon spacecraft, and the Crew Dragon vehicle that carries humans to and from space, according to the company’s announcement.

His career began at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked on high-voltage and high-energy pulsed power systems, before joining SpaceX. He holds 22 U.S. patents in high-voltage energy and power systems and lithium-ion battery design, according to VivoPower.

“The same physics governs energy storage on a rocket and energy storage at the boundary of a hyperscale data center,” Harris said in the press release. “The engineering discipline required to put humans in orbit is directly applicable.”

Harris runs Aeonix Studio, a research laboratory and venture studio registered at 530 S. Lake Ave. in Pasadena. The company, formally registered with the California Secretary of State as Aeonix PBC, focuses on advanced physical sciences, energy systems, and frontier engineering.

VivoPower, a B Corp-certified company founded in 2014 and listed on Nasdaq since 2016, operates a 41.5-megawatt data center in Mo i Rana, Norway, with another 40 megawatts under development and a 300-megawatt pipeline in Finland. The company trades under the ticker VIVO.

Kevin Chin, VivoPower’s executive chairman and CEO, said in the press release that Harris’s engineering background would support the company’s expansion. “There are very few engineers in the world who have designed battery systems, trusted to carry human beings into orbit and back,” Chin said.

The appointment is an advisory role. Harris will continue to run Aeonix Studio in Pasadena, where he advises and invests in companies working in high-performance battery technology, stationary energy storage, and next-generation electrification infrastructure, according to VivoPower.