Smash Notes

Back to Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory, with Philip Johnston & Ezra Feilden.

How Big Is the Starcloud 3 Spacecraft?

Ezra Feilden says Starcloud 3 is the company's largest platform, a vehicle of about two tons, and as many as 50 can deploy on one Starship launch.

The team moved in over the last few days, leaving a tiny office building for a manufacturing space that is still a little chaotic. Dirtier work stays in the fab shop: sheet metal, welding, and general fabrication, with MIG welding, TIG welding, laser welding, and a shear for sheet metal. Cleaner work happens in a separate area. The fab shop holds a Starcloud 3 manufacturing demonstrator because the team wanted experience building a primary structure at the scale of the flight vehicle. The vehicle is designed to go through the Pez dispenser door on Starship. Fully loaded it is around two tons and rated at 235 kilowatts.

Grokipedia·StarCloud·Starship

Transcript

Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory ·

Sourcery

More from this episode

  1. How Much Did Starcloud Pay for a Broken Vibration Table?Philip Johnston says Starcloud bought a secondhand broken vibration table for 200 grand after the team could not find a table in the US that would test a…
  2. Where Are Most New Satellites Built?Philip Johnston says Starcloud is based in the Seattle region because 90% of all satellites launched in the last few years by mass were designed, built, and…
  3. How Does Starcloud Cool Computers in Space?Adi Oltean says Starcloud cools computers in space with the liquid cooling that data centers on Earth switched to in 2025, because liquid cooling is the only…
  4. How Easy Is Booking a Falcon 9 Rideshare?Ezra Feilden says booking a Falcon 9 rideshare is unbelievably easy.
  5. Why Would Anyone Put a Data Center in Orbit?Philip Johnston says a data center in orbit gets cheaper than one on Earth once launch falls to about $500 a kilogram.
  6. What Is Starcloud One Doing With Satellite Imagery?Philip Johnston says Starcloud One runs inference on satellite imagery in orbit, so the coordinates of a vessel can come down in minutes rather than hours and…
  7. Why Does Everyone Leave a Starcloud 2 Test?Philip Johnston says everyone leaves the building for a Starcloud 2 vibration test because a xenon tank under the satellite has about half the explosive power…
  8. What Did Miguel Rivera Do at Helion?Miguel Rivera was the welder for Helion Energy, where the team built fusion generators, and he ran their fabrication shop for more than a year before becoming…
  9. What Did Bailey Montaño Do Before Starcloud?Bailey Montaño started at SpaceX in aerospace, spent about four years there, tried biotech and consumer product design, and then spent three years in fusion…
  10. Why Is Shooting Down a Satellite So Hard?Philip Johnston says shooting down a satellite is a lot harder than blowing up a data center in Virginia, because satellites travel at about 17,000 miles an…

People

More answers like this

Related episodes

Plays from this note through the rest of the episode.

Note

Weekly highlights

One letter a week.

The notes worth hearing, with the minute they were said.