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

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 tested in Redmond, Washington.

He and Ezra Feilden spent the first month of the company in El Segundo. A LinkedIn search for a spacecraft thermal engineer kept returning Redmond, Bellevue, and Seattle, so they moved. About half the team formerly worked at SpaceX. The other half came from the hyperscalers, with AWS and Azure down the road.

For data centers in space, the mix of satellite builders and cloud engineers makes the Seattle region the best place in the world to build Starcloud.

Grokipedia·Philip Johnston·StarCloud

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Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory ·

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  2. 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…
  3. 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.
  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…
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