Full Transcript for Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory

We're with Philip Johnston, the CEO, and we're going to go through the $2 billion company and what they're building behind us. That's the satellite we launched in November last year with the first NVIDIA H100s on board. StarCloud One separation confirmed. They told us it would cost $75 million to $100 million to do StarCloud One. We did it for about $2.5 million.

If the launch cost gets below around $500 a kilo, then it will be much cheaper to do this in space than terrestrially. We think we can fit about 10 terawatts in this dawn-dusk, sun-synchronous orbit. So that's about 20 times the entire US power grid. It's around two tons fully loaded, 235 kilowatts, and we can deploy up to 50 of them per Starship launch.

Do you think Tesla will merge with SpaceX? This isn't a hot take. This is just a fact. SpaceX is going to buy Tesla.

We are here at StarCloud in the Seattle region. Not going to disclose the exact location because it's a secret, right, Philip? Top secret. Top secret. Okay. We're with Philip Johnston, the CEO, and we're going to go through the $2 billion company and what they're building behind us. So welcome to StarCloud. On the screen, we actually have the location of StarCloud 1.

So that's the satellite we launched in November last year with the first NVIDIA H100s on board. This little green area is everything that is visible anywhere on Earth where you have line of sight to the satellite, because it means if we have ground stations anywhere in this green area, we can see the satellite. It's moving about 17,000 miles an hour.

So it takes about an hour and a half to circumnavigate the globe. So if we come back in half an hour, you'll probably find it over Africa somewhere. Yeah, it's moving fast. And before we walked over here, it was down here. Something special happened over here? Oh, yeah. So it actually just came over Cabo, which is where I proposed to my fiance.

And it only comes over there once every three days. So I waited till 6 a.m. and then showed her on the phone because I'd written a proposal on StarCloud One. Yeah. So, yeah. It's cute. Check out the post if you haven't yet. Okay. All right. So we're going to walk through the facility. Just give us like a sense of what we'll be looking at.

What stages of development are we going to see? StarCloud One, StarCloud Two, maybe. Yeah. StarCloud Three, anywhere close? Yeah, well, so StarCloud 1 is launched. StarCloud 2 we have in the assembly facility. As I say, this is midway through move-in, so please take it with a pinch of salt. There's boxes everywhere. And then we'll go through to the fab shop.

We've welded up a mock-up of the chassis of StarCloud 3 so you can get a sense of how big it is. And then we'll go through and we'll finish the tour in some of the newer facilities that we're bringing online next year. Awesome. Cool. Cool. This is the main assembly area for StarCloud 2. And this is the satellite in the background. You can see StarCloud 2.

You can see on the top the two lasers. And then we have some deployables. It's about 120 foot wingspan deployment. And we actually just put this through vibration testing. So this is our vibe table here. Fun story about this vibe table is we We actually had, I'm going to move around here so you can see it. So we couldn't find a vibe table in the US that would vibe with a pressure vessel on there in the time we needed.

And the lead time on new vibe tables is about like almost two years now. Oh, no. Yeah. So, and it's about $1.5 million for a new vibe table. So we actually bought this secondhand broken vibe table for 200 grand. And then the team worked all weekend to fix it up. Um, I don't know if you can see, maybe we can go around and you can see how janky like the amp that we bought for it is.

All right. We have a new entrant on the video. So we're here with Ezra. Ezra is also a co-founder. Do you want to give a couple sentences on your background and then we'll talk about the vibe table. For sure. Yeah, my name is Ezra Fieldin. I'm the co-founder and CTO at StarCloud. Before StarCloud, I was with Airbus designing and building satellites,

focusing on large deployable structures, which is a very critical piece of what we're building here. And then before that, I did my PhD in materials engineering. Damn. So, yeah, we're standing in front of our Vive table, our

very old, very beaten-up Vive table. We had to get this on an extremely short lead time, and new Vive tables are, you know, 26-month lead time, over $1 million, and that didn't work for our schedule, so the only option available to us, and we had to do this test in-house for various reasons. So the only option available to us was to get a second-hand vibe table.

And this one, I can tell you, has had a life. It is as old as I am.

It came to us filled with water. No! And with a horrendous internal leak. So there's very high voltage inside. Obviously, it's vibrating. There's high temperatures. And right in the heart of all of that, there was a very large leak, which is the reason why the previous owner sold it, evidently.

So we didn't realize that until we got it in house, you know, two days before the test, essentially. And so through the weekend, like evenings and weekends, we had to absolutely hustle to tear this thing down right to the core, repair the leak. We had an expert who from basically like the country's experts in vibe tables come and tell us that the repair is not possible.

and we pressed on and we got it limping along at least enough to complete our spacecraft level vibe test. So do you find this on like Facebook marketplace? Like where do we find old vibe tables? Yeah, so it tends to be auction houses. Yeah, surplus auction houses. When companies go out of business, they get rid of all their assets. And yeah, it's a bit of a...

Yeah, there's some diamonds in the rough there for sure. It's not easy to move. There's about 60 tons. Oh my God. 16 tons. Sorry, 16 tons. Which is...

Yeah, it's hefty. And to power this thing, we need a generator. So we have a very large generator outside. I know when I was pulling up, I was like, oh, we're in kind of like a warehouse office park. Which one could possibly be StarCloud? Probably the one with huge generators outside. Yeah, that's us. But yeah, I mean, this is when you have extremely tight timelines, when you're trying to do new things very quickly, you often find yourself in these kind of situations where you have to get very creative and hustle and basically not take no for an answer and just be incredibly scrappy.

And that's our superpower as a startup, I think, is the ability to turn these crazy scenarios around and make a success of them. It's a great point because StarCloud, you guys went from founding to in orbit in 21 months. Yeah, which is a record. I think the fastest anybody did that before us was four years. And that was basically because Adi and Ezra built the satellite by hand.

Yeah, we'll speak with Adi in a minute. Oh, my God. And so I know this is something that... might surprise people. It definitely surprised me because now I'm doing more of these tours and the locations, like it's not El Segundo, it's not down in Long Beach, but you guys are up here in the Seattle region. So why Seattle? Yeah. People don't realize this, but 90% of all satellites launched in the last few years by mass were designed, built, and tested in Redmond, Washington, which is exactly where we are now.

So we were literally, me and Ezra were sitting in El Segundo for the first month of the company. And we were typing into LinkedIn, like, okay, spacecraft thermal engineer. And it was literally going like Redmond, Redmond, Redmond, Bellevue, Seattle, Redmond, Redmond. And we were like, okay, shit. I guess we have to move up. And yeah, so about half our team actually formerly worked at SpaceX.

The other half were the hyperscalers. So we have AWS and Azure down the road. So for doing data centers in space, this is literally the best place in the world you could be. Okay, so we're also joined by another co-founder of StarCloud, Addy. So Addy, tell us a little bit about your background and how did you end up here? Yeah. Before StarCloud, I was at SpaceX for about two years.

I was a responsible engineer for a feature called tracking beams, which essentially gives Starlink to all the in-motion vehicles, including aviation, cruise ships, and even the Starship. So if you've ever seen those cool Starship videos, I helped build that. Before SpaceX, I was at Microsoft for about two decades. And in the last couple of years or so, I was working on a large-scale GPU deployment in production.

We onboarded the very first large-scale models before they were called LLMs in a bunch of data centers and working very closely with NVIDIA on that.

And it was really rewarding to be part of two keynotes in GDC, one in 2019, where Jensen talked about conversational AI. That was what it was called back then. And our demo was part of that keynote. And then later this year, part of the same GDC keynote in San Jose,

Jensen introduced Space One, which is the very first GPU designed to work in space. Damn. Yeah. Philip was telling me you've been mentioned in GTC talks multiple times. Not me personally, but our team. Yes. That's incredible. I helped build the demo. Yeah. So we're standing in front of StarCloud too. Do you want to give us a little rundown on it? Yeah, so people are busy at the moment.

They are about to fire the HDRM, which is essentially a latch that will deploy the solar panels on each side of the spacecraft. And if you hear a loud pop, that's it. So we are testing the satellite actively. We are testing various systems.

There you go. I was like, something's going to explode in here. Maybe not as climactic as wanted, but this is actually the most important

deployment event that happens in orbit. We use that to kick off the deployment of both solar panels in orbit and make sure you can get kilowatts of power to allow it to compete. So I know this is a very new facility, but where does that get made? Like where are all these components coming from? Is it vertically integrated? How do you think about engineering? We try to vertically integrate as much as possible.

Obviously, we are not manufacturing the NVIDIA boards or other high-level compute systems, but we integrate everything here and we manufactured our radiators. We put together the solar panels. So a lot of the cooling system is being built internally here, which is kind of our secret sauce, if you will. Another HDRM filing.

And yeah, we try to integrate as much as possible in-house. What's been the biggest technical challenge coming over to StarCloud? I think the cooling system and the radiators are by far the largest technical challenge and I think we are very proud of what we did and how it works and how compact the whole thing is. It's mostly a focus on engineering costs rather than is this possible or not.

We know it's possible, but the question is how do you make it super cheap and how you make it manufacturable at scale. Yeah, I mean, that's a big point. I was interviewing Sean McGuire and he was talking about data centers in space and he was like, I did the math on it and it makes sense. The math, maths. And so a large component of that is energy transfer and like how much energy is used on Earth for Earth data centers versus in space.

And so in space, this is going to be a little bit of a different environment. It is very, very cold, but you still need radiators. You need cooling, all that kind of stuff. So could you explain that out a little bit more? Well, it's basically the engineering math is hard, but economic math is the one that truly matters in orbit. So what you want to dissipate every single watt you're receiving from the sun.

So that is the hard part. How you make it very efficiently, how do you...

essentially emulate a cooling system that

mimics the one in data centers today on Earth. As probably people know, 2025 was the year of liquid cooling in all the data centers. So people have to switch to liquid cooling because that's the only way to achieve the incredible densities of compute in the next generation of data centers. And we are capitalizing on that and using the same thing, the same technology in space as well.

For those who don't know about the Fermi Explorer mission, can you explain that and why it's significant for you? Yeah, so my co-founders Adi Ezra and I have created a nonprofit with a few others, Kamgifaran and others. We created a nonprofit to send the first spacecraft to the nearest star. So the nearest star system to us is Alpha Centauri.

It's about four light years away. And we realized after doing StarCloud One that you can do things very cheaply. Like for example, StarCloud One, We had a quote from one of the primes. They told us it would cost $75 million to $100 million to do StarCloud One. We did it for about $2.5 million. No way. So we realized you can do things very cheaply.

You can just put things in space. Yeah, pretty much. And we found a trajectory. We had a physical AI lab out of MIT run this analysis and find a trajectory that allows us to get a spacecraft on a trajectory to Alpha Centauri for about 10 to $15 million. So it won't use any technology that doesn't exist today. It's gonna use

Hall effect ion thrusters with solar to power it. And we're gonna basically spiral in towards the sun for five years. And then we're gonna fire the thruster at the perihelion at the closest point to the sun for another five years. to create these ever-expanding ellipses. And then on the last firing, we're just gonna fling off in the direction.

It's actually not even anywhere close to where Alpha Centauri is today. Alpha Centauri is moving towards us and it will intersect on a path in about 80,000 years. So the hope is that we'll be both the first to leave on this journey to another star and also the last to arrive. So, you know, hopefully in 50 years or 100 years, there'll be better propulsion technology.

In a thousand years, there'll be much better propulsion technology. So I hope stuff starts flying past us. And then by the time we arrive in 80,000 years, you know, maybe for 15,000 years, there's already been a colony, even if your propulsion technology was only 20% faster. And so what I hope happens is they sort of applaud our spacecraft across the finish line, they capture it, and they put it in a museum or something.

And then from there, it'll take sort of five to 10 million years to settle the galaxy, even with just today's technology. And then from there, it's about a billion years to get to Andromeda, our nearest galaxy. And then from there to get to the local group of 50 galaxies is about another sort of five billion years. And the purpose for me of doing it is like either all of that happens or it doesn't for some reason.

And like, yeah, there's this idea of the Fermi paradox, the idea, the question of why we don't see more intelligence in our galaxy or more obvious evidence of it. Maybe in aliens. Yeah, why our solar system isn't part of a galactic empire. It's pretty quick, like 10 million years to settle the galaxy is the blink of an eye in galactic timeframes.

So if there had been intelligent life on any other star, trillion planets in our galaxy, if there'd been intelligent life on any other one in the last 10 billion years, galaxy's been around for more than 10 billion years. then it would have been five million years to settle the whole galaxy. And so it's really kind of concerning that we don't see more evidence of that.

To me, there's two options. Either we're exceptionally rare, maybe we're the first species or intelligence to get to this level of complexity in the whole galaxy, or maybe even in the Local 50 cluster of galaxies. Or, and by the way, I'm open to that. I like that idea. Like maybe we're going to be the first to settle the galaxy and that's a great privilege.

Or the other alternative is intelligent life doesn't last very long. Maybe there's been intelligent life on many other stars in our galaxy. And for some reason it doesn't survive very long. So either way, I think we should like know about that. And one of the reasons to do this mission is to make people think more about our place in the galaxy and more about the Fermi paradox.

How did you get into space and how did you get interested in this? So, I mean, I've always been interested in space. Like I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, like anybody. But why, like what exposed you to that?

I guess like, yeah, sci-fi movies when I was a kid, like I read the Asimov novels, Foundation series. Yeah, there was this phrase that people sometimes say, which is like, we're too late to explore the earth and we're too early to explore the solar system in the galaxy. And I always thought that was really sad. Like it was exciting to me to be an explorer and the voyages across the globe were kind of exciting to me.

And then realizing, okay, we've kind of explored everything now. Everything's done. It's kind of sad. And then, yeah, recently started thinking, okay, well, maybe we can do our own, like our own effort. Maybe we can be the first to send a spacecraft to the nearest star. And we're like, wow, what an incredible privilege that would be. So if you wrote a sentimental note on StarCloud One, what are you going to put on the spacecraft? I'm definitely going to put the name of my fiancee on there.

So for the low, low price of... Oh, you're going to start selling logo spots? Wow, we got an advertising option. Yeah, there you go. People can go to familyexplorer.com slash donate and people can put whatever message they want on there. But what would I put on there? I'm excited to put lots of information, like records of what Earth is like.

And we're going to have some interest. We'll have some scientific payloads on there. We'll have the Golden Record, which is one of the artworks that they put on one of the probes going out of the solar system. But then we'll also have a solicitation period for various artistic payloads, like various artworks that people can put on there. So we're actually, yeah, we're drawing ideas from various places.

One of them, one cool-ish scientific payload. Did you ever see this fruit fly that Google or there was a startup, they cut, they sliced the brain of a fruit fly. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll put a digital copy of that, like this fruit fly thing and like. Whoever finds this is going to be like, humans, they're tiny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They'll be like, how the hell did they know this?

That's awesome. All right, so I do have to address this because we've done plenty of hot takes now. We did one at the New York Stock Exchange. We did one in Paris at the Raise AI Summit. So I have to ask you now, what is your hottest take? Every time I do a hot take with you, I get in trouble. Last time we did it, I said you should buy SpaceX stock and then Elon retweeted it.

But you were right. I was totally right. I was 100% right. Okay. And then what was my hottest take? Let's stick on the theme. So Elon posted that they're going to be worth $100 trillion in 10 years. I think they might be worth more than $100 trillion in 10 years. You do. Yes. If all goes to plan and there's no world war, you believe SpaceX will be worth more than $100 trillion.

Correct. Okay, well, that'll be good for business. Yeah, exactly. What would make that up, though? So, like, break that down. How do you think about it?

Actually, well, mostly a good chunk of it will come from the fact that Tesla's Optimus will be up and running. And so once you have Optimus is building Optimus factories, then you have this incredible exponential. And so for all of manufacturing, all of the rate of...

The rate of growth will increase a lot once Optimus is producing Optimus'. It's a bit like what's happening now with the recursive self-improvement, but for the physical world. Do you think Tesla will merge with SpaceX, which will help with that? This isn't a hot take. This is just a fact SpaceX is going to buy Tesla and they have to wait until the Unlocks of the stock because if they do then everyone's gonna say the price wasn't fair So at the moment Yeah, the the moment it's that you're not gonna see too many announcements, but I think there's a roadster announcement tonight But beyond that I don't think you're gonna see any announcements about optimus for the next year

and then once they once they do the merger Then we'll hear a lot more I know this will come out after the Roadster announcement, but what's your prediction?

What I've heard is they have these cold gas thrusters from like the spacecraft that they've, so you have a compressor that's compressing air essentially, and then that's being fired out the back, which means, which gives you like absurd acceleration and cornering and everything else. And also I think, I think there's, I think. Lift? Lift.

Yeah. I actually think you can get lift on these things. Oh my gosh. What do you, what do you think? I just, I kind of thought it might be an eVTOL.

That would be wild, but I don't think it is. You don't think it is? We would know by now if it's an eVTOL. I think you could just skip the whole car thing and just go to eVTOL, call it a roadster. That would be amazing, like that would be incredible, but I would be extremely surprised if it was an eVTOL. All right, stay tuned for our predictions.

Oh my God. I don't know, this one is a little bit more than length. Length and girth, length and girth. That's crazy. So what do you, is this for what? This is for screwing in bolts.

That's crazy. Where did you find this? I went to a Halloween store this morning because I was like... Well, that's actually pretty impressive for a Halloween store. I can't be sword mugged by the rest of your guests. That's wild.

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Okay, so we just finished the vibe table. We finished looking at StarCloud 2. Now you want to go into... We'll go to the fab shop so we can see

where we're welding and fabricating various aluminum and steel parts, some of which for the actual spacecraft and most of which is for test equipment and other things. Maybe Ezra can talk a bit about the fab shop.

Yeah, this is a big upgrade from our last facility. So we've literally just moved in here as of like the last few days. So everything's a little bit chaotic, but we moved from this tiny office building into this lovely manufacturing space.

and this area of it is we call the fab shop so this is where we do dirtier work so that the cleaner work goes on in there dirtier work happens here so we're talking sheet metal work, welding and general fabrication

So we have lots of fab shop equipment here. We have MIG welding, TIG welding, laser welding. We have a shear for sheet metal. And right here we have the manufacturing demonstrator for StarCloud 3. So StarCloud 3 is our largest platform. It's a two ton vehicle, approximately. So this is the StarCloud 3 manufacturing demonstrator. So we wanted to get some experience building a primary structure of the scale of our StarCloud 3 vehicle.

So this vehicle is designed to go through the Pez dispenser door for Starship. It's around two tons fully loaded, 235 kilowatts, and we can deploy up to 50 of them per Starship launch. My God. I've not seen Starship or I have no idea on the scale of that, but you said two of these fit in? So per layer, so you get two of these. Wide and then? Wide and then 25 tall.

Oh my God. So from here to the ceiling of these stacked in two rows. So right now we're in the middle of Starship, we're inside of it. Yeah, that gives you an idea of the diameter of Starship, the fact that this can fit in there. That's insane. It's an enormous vehicle. How have you guys been launching today? I know you have three launches coming up as well.

So our first launch was with Falcon 9. So yeah, Falcon 9 rideshare mission. Our upcoming launches are all with Falcon.

And yeah, it's really hard to beat the benefits and the economics of rideshare when you're producing single missions like we are at the moment. The future is definitely Starship. And that's what we're gearing up for here. What's the process like for booking a ride?

So booking rideshare is unbelievably easy. So it was actually the, basically the first thing we did as a company was we booked the launch for StarCloud One. Do you have to book it really far in advance? Like how do you, how do you, I mean, you're like gunning for getting on the vehicle, but like, how does that work? Yeah. So we, we booked about yeah, 21 months in advance.

And the process is the, the initial booking is you can pay for it with a credit card. You can get a confirmation straight away. You could.

Ride share is, Falcon 9 ride share is going away though. So these were the rosy days when it was much easier to get a single payload launched. So we're in a transitionary period at the moment where Falcon 9 is being wound down and Starship has yet to be wound up. So we're definitely in a crunch time at the moment when it comes to launch. What is the process for that though? Do you need insurance? What happens if it doesn't go to plan? So insurance is relatively inexpensive for Falcon 9 because it has such a strong track record, 300 launches, consecutive launches without a failure.

So you can ensure a failure on launch, the rocket explodes, the payload doesn't separate, that kind of thing. It's much more difficult to ensure things going wrong with the spacecraft as this is the first spacecraft of its type to be built. So we got insurance for the launch. And

if something goes wrong, then that can give you a bit of a financial payout. But what it can't compensate you for is the lost time, which is really the most valuable resource for a fast-moving startup. So yeah, I'm slightly on the fence of the value of insuring payloads. But yeah, we'll take it case by case. We were just at Rocket Lab and we did a tour.

We did a series there. And the one topic that keeps on getting delayed is Neutron. How do you think that will or will not affect the market if and when it starts to be serviceable? Yeah, I think just yesterday they publicly announced the first flight will be 2027.

Composite manufacturing is really hard. I know from personal experience, very large composite structures often take a bit longer than you expect, especially when you're producing them for the first time and you're running the tooling for the first time. I have a lot of faith that Rocket Lab can get neutron flying regularly. They've proven that they have 100 launches of electron, so they can do scale.

So yeah, we're definitely rooting for them as well. All right, so now we're walking around here. You have a motorcycle. We're going to go look at that. You can look at it if you want. Whose is that? That was a joke, by the way. I think it's Bailey's.

Does that go into space? Yeah, maybe. It depends how fast they go. Everyone's laughing. I'm permanently terrified that somebody's going to kill themselves on a motorbike. Oh, no. Yeah, that is a liability. Yeah. So this is kind of interesting. This is a half-built zero-gravity sort of offloading rig. We have these runners that run in two accesses.

The deployable StarCloud 2 runs down this. This is one half of it. The other half goes that side. It's like a 120 foot long deployable. Oh my God. Yeah. That small package you saw there extends down the length of this. And then on one side and then down the length of that on the other side. Oh, my God. Yeah. And the first few segments of that is a radiator segment.

That's the radiator we've designed and fabricated in-house. As Adi was mentioning, our design is way more efficient than any other. So when we launch in January, it will be by far the largest commercial deployable radiator in space. And the nearest comparison is the International Space Station. Our radiator is at least 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator, and about 500 times less cost per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator.

Now the ISS is an easy benchmark to meet on cost, but on mass it's quite an achievement. One of the biggest topics, and I know we talked about this with Addy, is the economics of this. You are making more economical satellites going out in space and the vehicle itself. So that's one thing. And so I'd love to break that down in the economics there and then also further drill down the difference between on land, like terrestrial data centers versus orbital data centers.

Yeah. So the whole thing is actually contingent on the launch cost. So if the launch cost gets below around $500 a kilo, then it will be much cheaper to do this in space than terrestrially. And I think a sort of good comparison for this is if you build a new solar project on Earth to power data center, because solar is kind of the cheapest form of energy we have terrestrially, And so the way you can think about it is solar terrestrially has these three big costs.

The biggest cost is the cost of permitted land, depending where you are. Second biggest cost is the cost of batteries to origin backup power. And then the last cost is the cost of the solar cells themselves. And so in space, number one, we don't need permitted land. So your biggest cost is gone. We don't need batteries and backup power because they're 24-7 in the sun.

And then we need eight times less solar cells because one square meter of solar panel in space produces about eight times the energy of one in space. So we have all these savings in space. The main additional cost we have is the launch cost. And so that's where this trade-off comes. And that's where we see when you run those numbers, you come out to about $500 a kilo, where it makes more sense to do in space than terrestrially.

And of course, right now with Starship, we're at about $5,000 a kilo. Sorry, with Falcon 9. The design of Starship is designed to produce

internal launch costs for SpaceX of $20 to $40 a kilo. So long as they pass that launch cost through to us at anything less than, say, 10 times their marginal launch cost or even more, whether that makes sense for us.

um right now by the way on falcon 9 they charge two or three times their marginal launch cost so it seems reasonable yeah another thing that i listen to so i listen to a handful of your interviews one of the other very concerning points is chips and chip failures so how does that work into the model Yeah, for sure. It's actually a super relevant point.

I think it's actually more relevant and pertinent than even cooling, which people think is the biggest challenge. We've basically solved the cooling challenge. The other part of it that we're working on is the radiation shielding and testing all the chips in different particle accelerators to make sure they can survive the radiation environment in space.

And the reason we put so much time into that is if the chips have you know like a 10 or 20 higher failure rate in space than they do on the ground then the whole economics of the model fall apart and the reason is the chips are by far the most expensive part of what we're doing actually um and so there's a few ways that you you can go around that i mean essentially we're not going to have access to the satellites once they launch so they're they'll operate a bit like the way the starlink satellites work which is You need to have redundancy on critical systems, you know, things like pumps, and then you over provision things which fail over time, like the solar panels,

you're going to lose a few percent per year. So you slightly over provision that. And then on the chips, we have a longer burning period on the ground. Most chips actually fail in the first period of their life. And so if you can put them through a more rigorous burning period. Why is that? I don't know. It's basically the infant mortality of the chips.

Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, my God. It sounds kind of terrible. That's horrible. So what you want is to get through the infancy period and find out all those failures. So for StarCloud 2, we had a three-month burn-in period. It basically means you run the chips hot for three months so you can find all those failures early. It's basically like... Yeah, if the chips can survive three months at full power, the chance they have a failure from that point onwards diminishes very dramatically versus the chance they have a failure in the first three months.

So you have five chips up in space right now, including one H100. Yes. What are they doing? Actually, we have three chips from NVIDIA, two from ARM, and we also have some CPUs from AMD on StarCloud One. What they're doing is, at the moment, we use them to do some interesting workloads like train the first model in space, NanoGPT from Andrej Karpathy.

We ran the first version of Gemini. But now they're actually doing useful workloads for government customers. So they are mainly in sort of as a test phase, but we're doing inference on satellite imagery. So on synthetic aperture radar data, on hyperspectral data. So we actually just... We'll do an announcement about some of the results of this, but we've got some very interesting results.

The use case for that is, let's say the government has a bunch of military satellites. They collect enormous amounts of mostly imagery, but also other types of data. They don't want to have to wait for a ground station to downlink all of that data. If they can run inference on that at the edge, we can then send down the insight much quicker.

For example, if they're monitoring a patch of water, They might want to know is there a vessel crossing some boundary. At the moment what they do is they take an enormous amount of imagery and then they have to wait at least an hour and a half to get to a ground station and then they try and downlink as much as they can but that's usually not very much.

Once we're in space we have a bunch of optical terminals on our satellite. In real time they can send data to us. We can then run the inference workloads on our satellite and then we can downlink the coordinates of a vessel for example in minutes rather than hours and days, which is the current way that this works. That's wild. Oh my gosh.

So our initial use cases for these satellites and what they're doing right now, all the satellite operators and that kind of data, when do you think it'll reach outward into the other parts of the economy? Yeah, so it's entirely dependent on the launch cost hitting 500 bucks a kilo. So the business as it is today runs really

economically with the current launch price. In order to be competitive with terrestrial data centers on energy and infrastructure cost, that's where we need the launch cost to be 500 bucks a kilo or less. My expectation is that we've already seen Starship deploying its first payloads. We'll see reusability of Starship probably within a year, or at least we'll see the capture of the upper stage.

Reflight might take a little bit longer. And then 2028 onwards, we're hoping to see SpaceX selling capacity to commercial customers. You know, if they don't, we also are, you know, considering other options. And so we've booked on a bunch of different other launch vehicles, not just Falcon 9, but also some others. And I think we announced Stoke already.

We announced Firefly and we'll announce some others soon. Cool rats. Yeah. Well, if the goal on Earth is to get to a one gigawatt facility, a five gigawatt facility, what is realistic for space and what does that look like in mass? Yeah. So very large data centers on Earth are usually used for training large models. So you need a very highly internally networked cluster to train a frontier model.

In space, for a long time, we're probably not going to be docking together things. And so most of the workloads we're going to be doing in space is running inference. And that's usually for things like coding agents and back office business processing agents and chat GPT queries. So the roadmap is we launch a bunch of things like this. So the 200 kilowatt one, we can launch 50 per Starship.

So you're talking about close to 10 megawatts of new compute capacity per Starship launch. And we've filed with the FCC for a constellation of 88,000 of those. That's crazy. And that's just the first 88,000. That's the first 88,000. We're not stopping there. So that enables us to deploy the first 20 gigawatts. We think we can fit about 10 terawatts in this dawn-dusk, sun-synchronous orbit.

So that's about 20 times the entire U.S. power grid. And then once we run out of that, we can go to Cislunar, MEO, Beyond Geo, and to the Lagrange points. And we can, yeah, essentially, if you want to scale much more compute, then you really need to do it in space. So will we have access to sunlight on Earth if we have so many solar panels up? Yes.

And the reason is... Because I saw, was it Star Cloud 3? It's four square kilometers in orbit? What is that? Yes.

Yeah, StarCloud 3 will take a while before we start docking together these large structures. But even when we do, they won't ever cast a shadow on the Earth. And the reason is they're flying over the poles. So if this is the sun is here and this is Earth spinning on its axis, they fly over the poles like this. And so the Earth will never

create a shadow on our satellite and our satellite will never create a shadow on Earth. So they never go behind or in front of Earth, basically. The more you know. than what you know. Science. So, Philip, we're back at the vibe table and we're about to do some testing. Do you want to explain this? Yeah, so we need to simulate the launch environment.

And so in order for SpaceX to allow us to launch on a rocket with multiple tenants, they want to make sure that both nothing's going to fly off from any individual satellite in launch, but also they don't want any satellite to resonate at a certain frequency, which throws the whole stack off. And so the point of the vibe table is to put the satellite through every different frequency and amplitude that the satellite is going to experience during launch and also this shock test so that we make sure nothing flies off and we also make sure that we don't have resonance at a certain frequency.

How long do you run it for? It depends on the test, but the launch environment itself is about seven minutes. And so there are some tests we would run for a few minutes. Most tests we run for a shorter period, especially what they call the sort of...

Yeah, like random vibe, we run a bit longer, but there's the shock test we run for shorter. Have you ever... sat on a vibe table. I've never sat on that, I have to say. Yeah. I've touched them before, but

we were at Zipline and we went into their testing room and they had a vibe table and these like RC propeller, like RC fans to test the drones with. And they would fly them in front of it and see if anything would, you know, be fragile or break if there were any like fractures and it ended up just being me walking through which is there i think they go like 80 miles an hour wow yeah crazy

Oh, there you go. Oh. So this is a very low frequency test. We're doing it as low frequency, mainly so that you can see what it looks like when it moves. But when it moves faster, basically, you won't be able to see it moving. They're moving at least 50 hertz, so 50 times back and forth per second.

And this is basically a huge solenoid, so a huge magnet that's pulling this thing in and out. It's basically speeding up now.

Should we lock in? Yeah, we're good. So the hardware we have on the table at the moment is part of our thermal management system called the accumulator. So we have liquid cooling on StarCloud 2 and all of our future vehicles. As the liquid heats up, it wants to expand. And so you have to have a component which allows that expansion to take place.

Otherwise, you'll burst your cooling system. So that's what the accumulator does. It allows for that thermal expansion of the fluid to manage the pressure inside the cooling system. And that's what we have on the table right now is the accumulator for StarCloud 2. Yep.

We get... Yeah, go for it. Yeah. There you go.

So... Oh, my God. That's crazy. Yeah, so

this is right now the test is doing is what's called a sine sweep. It's where we're going to go through every different frequency and amplitude that the satellite will experience during launch. So it starts very low frequency. We're doing this low frequency. Normally, we wouldn't even start this low, but we wanted to be able to see that it's moving here.

As it gets faster and faster, you won't really be able to see the moving of it.

What is the worst thing that a vibe table has done? The worst thing that a vibe table will? Has a vibe table like ever, like as a magnet, like shot out or anything? No, the actual vibe tables themselves are pretty safe. The worst thing that can happen with a vibe table is whatever you're testing can explode. So for example, underneath StarCloud 2, we have this Xenon tank for the thrusters.

And if the xenon tank explodes, it's about half the explosive power of a hand grenade. That's really good to know. That's why we're not doing that test today. So does everyone leave the building when you test that? Literally, everybody leaves the building. So we had... We put this entire satellite on this. By the way, you can see it's in two axes.

So the solenoid actually can flip up and we can test it like this so that we can test in different axes. But yeah, when we fire that test up, we have to, everybody has to leave the building. I doubt the toy manufacturer that has storage across the street has any idea what's going on in here. They have no idea. But they are far enough away that we know that they're safe.

They're going to be okay. Yeah. Why is everyone running out? Yeah.

That's first mode. OK. So what they're testing for is this first mode. It's the first frequency at which it's resonating. And when you can hear it making this clicking sound, that means we've hit the first mode of this thing here.

What SpaceX requires is that you don't have a first mode below a certain frequency. I think it's around 40 hertz. So it cannot resonate at anything less than 40 times a second. And the reason for that is, let's say it would resonate at like twice a second, then the whole thing's going to go like this back and forth. And that will move all the other payloads in the stack.

That's a really good point. So what is the process to get your space prop or any kind of components up into space tested to make sure that it's like viable for Falcon 9 or Starship? Yeah, so as we mentioned, booking is just put your credit card down, but then that kicks off a whole long process where both regulatory, we have to file with the FCC for the orbit and for the spectrum we're gonna use.

And we have to have a de-orbit procedure and all of these kinds of things. And then SpaceX has a whole laundry list of requirements, mainly to be honest, to make sure that your spacecraft isn't gonna destroy any other spacecraft on the stack. So if you book a fully dedicated Falcon 9, the requirements are less stringent than if you're booking a rideshare because they need to make sure you're not going to move the whole stack or you're not going to have things flying off and killing other spacecraft.

Damn. Yeah. So how do they actually verify your approvals? So we have to do VIBE and then we send them the VIBE reports after we've done the VIBE testing. Has anybody ever...

I don't think so. It would be quite hard to lie. I mean, reproducing these vibe reports would be quite a challenge. I don't know why you would do that, unless you're an op. Unless you're an op. Unless you're an op. There you go. Jeez, I think we just uncovered something. Okay, cool. How good is AI at real professional work? Mercore's AI Productivity Index, or APEX, tracks it with every major frontier model release.

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Visit deal.com slash sorcery. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash sorcery. All right, so we're walking on through to the Laser Lab. How many people work at StarCloud? Right now, it's 30 people at StarCloud. Wow, that's it? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. 30, only two non-engineers. And so we'll probably have 50 by the end of the year, maybe 100 by the end of next year.

But we very deliberately keep the team extremely lean. As I say, we have the most kick-ass engineering team on planet Earth. uh this will become a full like laser lab so we'll use this for cutting and welding of um aluminum and things we just want to show you the uh we have a little demo for you make things go zap yeah yeah this is camilla who's uh we want to give you a mic and you can talk through it or do you want to talk you can you can have a little watch demo So this is our CNC X-Tool laser cutter.

We use this to do quick prototyping on different types of materials. It just gives us a lot of different flexibility of getting things done as fast as possible. So right now, I just have a little demo with some $30 stainless. Sorry for the compressor. A little loud. But you'll see just how fast and how quick this can do very complex cuts.

And it's extremely accurate. So I'll run a quick demo here.

I'm always getting nervous. If you want to get the camera in there, you can probably get a shot. Here, you can go in there, bro. Yeah, I'll hand this back to you. Thanks. All right, ready to go?

Fire. I can't see. It's too reflection. You'll see it here, Aaron.

oh my god it's so cute it's a little present for you that's awesome i got some here that are ready oh my god so stuff like this helps a lot to move quickly and it gives a lot of flexibility and this is just a start we're going to get a much larger professional machines Wow. Is this your favorite tool or? One of them. One of them? The next one's going to be my favorite.

What is it? It's going to be an Amada fiber laser cutter. So that we can fit material that's up to, I believe, 5 by 10 feet. So it's a professional grade laser cutter. So it's going to be significantly more capable than this one is. Damn. That's fun. Yeah. Thank you. Of course. And as I understand, you yourself... Oh, really? Okay, I got to keep it.

I can take it if you want me to put it in my pocket. Here, I'll give it to Brett.

All right, so we walked through... Fab shop,

assembly area, laser. We'll be assembling a clean room, which I don't think we showed you, but that's on the other side. But as I understand, you yourself are actually a proficient welder. Is that true? I made a very bold claim, but I did learn how to weld in college. I think we should put this to the test. I think your viewers would find this very exciting.

I am down to dry. I was called a prodigy, so we'll see. Still the case. We'll find out. We'll find out. So we have some welding materials back here. Shall we get you in? Sure. Do I have to like, should I change everything? Yeah, you need to change. Then I'll change. All right. We've now advanced. We're now with Miguel, the engineering operations lead here at StarCloud.

What are you going to show us today and what's your background? Yeah, so we're gonna do a little bit of welding, just traditional welding. We do a lot of laser welding here at StarCloud, but we can also fabricate pretty much anything out of steel, aluminum, titanium, stainless steel. So we're set up for doing MIG welding right now. So we're gonna have you run some beads and make some sparks.

And yeah, so before here, I was the welder for Helion Energy where we built fusion generators. I ran their fabrication shop over there for over a year. And before that, I've been working at a lot of different fab shops doing architectural, structural, you know, welding and fabrication. And before that, I spent a decade in the U.S. Army. Oh, my God.

Deploying overseas. How did you get into welding? I wanted to do something very different. I wanted to do something that was, you know, neutral. So in the sense that I was contributing to society in a different way. So I decided to get into fabrication and welding after listening to Mike Rowe, the guy from Dirty Jobs. He said, you know, United States really needs welders and it needs people to build stuff with their hands.

And I was like, well, I can build stuff with my hands. So that led me to this career path, which has been very rewarding. It's very satisfying. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. A little addicting. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. A lot of fun. That sounds like you. You posted recently on X. Somebody was like, America needs more welders. And you're like posting shit about how good you are at welding.

So now we're going to find out. Now we're going to find out. Now we're going to find out. I used to be very good. So for background, this is like not at all in this world. But I went to college for studio art. Like I grew up as an artist. And I was also very entrepreneurial, so I ended up going that path. But I went to college for art. And so the first year of studio art, you do every discipline, every practice.

And one of them we went and we did metalwork, woodwork, glassblowing. Nice. All of the fun flame stuff. Like, it was so fun. And then I'm like, well... making this for fun isn't really a job, you know? Like, it's like, you might as well be doing that, but at trades. So, like, I don't really understand that, but it was so much fun. And I was called a prodigy, so.

We will see. We're going to find out. We're going to give you a little bit of PPE so the sparks can't burn you. So just put this jacket on. And we're going to give you some... Should I tie my hair back? I don't think I have it. If you keep it in the jacket, you might be fine. As long as it's behind you, you're fine. And make sure that you button at least a couple of the buttons.

I'll button them. As long as you have all this on, closed-toe shoes, you'll be just fine. If you feel anything hot, just stop and step back, but you should be perfectly fine. Yeah, I remember we weren't allowed to wear any polyester. Yeah.

Perfect. And then you can do your sleeves as well.

You haven't done any of this? Why? He's never here. Traveling the world. It's true. He's always on stage somewhere. Why aren't you in the shop? So we'll have you put this on first. So the way you put it on goes over your head and you click this and then you can leave this up, right? Then when it's time to weld, you can put it down. You can see through it just fine.

And the second that you start welding, it'll auto darken. So you don't have to worry about doing anything. All you have to do is put it on, crank this down, and you'll be ready to go. I'm going to do the same. I'm going to put on some PPE.

Do you have any kind of glasses? I'm going to be quite far back. You can use the same one right there. This one? Yep. You can put that on. Who is she?

Very nice. That one, my hand skipped a little bit. Yep. That's fine. Still counts. We can do one more if you want. Okay. One more. All right. Last one. This is one that counts. All right. Stay nice and tight.

Closer. Nice. You're hired. Not bad. Good job. Let's go. Nice. America needs welders. Nice job. Cool. Thank you, Miguel. You're very welcome. This was so much fun.

That's my real reaction. So on a scale of 1 to 10, what are we talking about here? You're a solid 5. Wow. That's amazing. I've seen you guys for 10 years and don't do a job like that. Damn! That's pretty good. You must pay attention and take good instructions. That's right. We do.

That's great. Cool, thank you. They just lifted the satellite. I don't know if you want to... Maybe it's too late to get footage of that, but if you want, we just... Yeah, let's go over there. So we just did the welding and... You crushed it. I'm a five. Out of ten. He didn't say out of ten. It could be out of five. He did say out of ten.

Did he? I thought he said you're a solid five. No, he said you're a solid five out of ten. Did he? Okay, okay, okay. It's like, damn, that's pretty good.

Okay, but I was wondering, like... How does the flow change of how many people are working on the floor versus up in the offices through the different stages and processes of building out StarCloud 2? Yeah, so actually most people you can see are both engineering and we have all the engineers make sure that they are hands-on with the satellite as well.

So half the time these people will be upstairs designing stuff on CAD, the other half the time they're down here fiddling with wires and testing stuff. We also have a technician team. That was Miguel. We got four technicians, some more coming on soon. Maybe five now. I don't want to get it wrong. And their job is welding and fabrication, actually producing the satellite.

So yeah, Miguel's team. The whole computer module here is an aluminum box that they in-house produced and fabricated. And I am contributing to that. You are contributing a huge amount. Whenever you need me, let me know. I can come on. For your listeners, it is official. You have now done more welding at StarCloud than I have. Wow. You got to really visit Miguel.

I think he's waiting for you to put in some work. You're not doing enough.

Bailey, tell us a little bit about yourself. I know we're in front of StarCloud 2 and something just happened and you guys are testing things, but we'd love to learn more about you and how you contributed. So I'm the engineering manager here at StarCloud.

And what we're doing right now is a leak check of the prop system. So right now we have a fully fueled electric propulsion system, ion thruster, and we are testing it after Vibe to make sure that we didn't introduce any cracks or other leaks during the Vibe test. How did you come here? How did you get to StarCloud? It was a bit of a long journey.

So I started my career at SpaceX in aerospace. I spent about four years there. Then I did a couple other side quests in biotech and consumer product design. Those didn't really stick. Moved on to fusion energy, which was really cool. But at the end of that three-year stint, I realized I'm a space nerd. I need to be working on space to be happy.

And fortunately, living in Seattle, there's a ton of cool companies in the area. But StarCloud really stuck out. Back then, they had a different name. And got in contact with the founders super early on. And the rest is history. What's your favorite thing about Philip?

You can't do that. You can't do that. What do you hate about him? Yeah, what do you hate about him? What's your least favorite? We don't say hate. What's your biggest challenge with Philip over here? Does he not give you enough attention? What's going on? Let's work this out on camera. It's a two-sided coin or whatever, but like the office is very busy with tours and things like that all the time.

We got to go. It's good and bad. That was the politest way to tell you to fuck off. Damn, Bailey, give me the mic. That's funny. Okay, so what are you most looking forward to? What is your favorite part of the process?

I think the next thing I'm looking forward to most is obviously the launch for sure. I'm going to be tremendously proud of this. Like a lot of blood, sweat and literal tears into this thing. As far as the whole design process goes, I would say kind of the test is my favorite part. That's where the rubber really hits the road. So this recent vibration test was a really big one.

And then the cooling system was another big one where back when we were in Colorado not long ago. That was our first full-up integrated test of the whole cooling system, which was kind of like my baby from day one. So it was really cool to see that up and running too. So everybody always asks about what the hardest thing about StarCloud is, and it's the thermal system.

these radiators in particular. Bailey was responsible for designing, fabricating the radiators. And also, Bailey is responsible for the satellite being here. So we had, in the end state, we only had three weeks to do the final assembly of all of the satellite. And Bailey went down and basically built that bus by scratch, from scratch. Damn.

Where'd you build it? In Colorado, in our bus provider's office. Oh, my God. All right, so we're just leaving the main facility. We're now going over here. Yeah, we're going to go to... You're buying up the entire... We're building a bit of a campus here. This is definitely the place where you need to be to build AI satellites, basically, SI satellites.

So we've got now this middle section that we have now.

This will come online in November, and then we have access to the third one in February next year. And so this enables us to scale manufacturing for StarCloud 3. And the reason we need so much space, one of the reasons is you have 100-meter, almost 400-foot deployables on StarCloud 3 that we need to test the mechanisms on. But also, to manufacture something like 88,000, we're going to need a way bigger facility.

I just think Brett's going to trip. I'm so sorry. It's fine, it's fine. To manufacture 88,000, okay. To manufacture 88,000, we're gonna need a whole bunch more space. So how many do you think you'll be able to produce a day? So we'll be up to 100 a week from what we've got here. So 10 a day or more than 10 a day after you. So this is one of the three spaces.

And so we've got about 100,000 square foot that we can fit out for manufacturing. So we're going to remove this wall and we'll remove that wall. And then that enables us to... This is huge. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's going to be quite a sight to behold when this is up and running. You should throw a Halloween party in here with this. Yeah. We're going to do an opening party sometime soon, so you're very much welcome.

Thank you. I know you're on the road all the time. You never know where... Who knows? Maybe Woodinville in three weeks. I know.

Okay, so in here, it's going to look much different than the previous facility. It will look pretty similar, actually, to the previous facility. It'll look the same? Except with a manufacturing line, like a proper... In the end state, we want it to be like an auto manufacturing line. So when you see a Tesla factory, you see cars going down the line, it'll be exactly like that, except with StarCraft III chassis going down the line with various things being added.

Okay, so this is a crazy question. How does StarCloud 3 get to Starship?

We load them on the back of a truck and then drive them down the motorway. That's it? That's it, yeah. It's very similar to the way, at the moment, just down the road from here is where the full Starlink facility is. So they literally load all those on the back of a truck and then drive them across the country to Florida. Damn. Okay. Wow.

All right. So one thing we haven't talked about yet is StarCloud has raised $450 million in total. What are you using the money for? How is the capital being utilized? Yeah. Well, right now, so launch is very constrained right now, especially from 2028, 2029 onwards.

So a portion of that cash is going to reserving launch slots. A bunch of it's going to fitting out these places and then hiring and materials and everything else.

Yeah, we're making about a million dollars a week on interest right now. Oh, my God. A million dollars a month, sorry, on interest. Wow. But soon we'll be spending. Brex has a really good treasury product. We do use Brex, actually, and they do have a great treasury product, so there you go. Oh, my God. I know I get a good interest on that.

So one major thing that has been a topic of discussion as global competition heats up and satellites become the greatest asset for national security is What happens if someone tries to shoot it down or our adversaries get in contact with it? Or maybe there's a listening device. Apparently there was one at OpenAI. So how do you think through the national security concerns when it comes to chips and data centers in space? Yeah, so it's a great point and one we think a lot about.

It's actually a lot harder to shoot down a satellite than it is to, for example, blow up a data center in Virginia,

which is surprising because the reason is satellites are traveling at about 17,000 miles an hour. And so to target and have some kind of kinetic impact on a satellite at that speed is very difficult. And we know this. One of the reasons we have a pretty good case study actually from the Starlink satellite. So Starlink is being used in Ukraine and also Star Shield.

And it's not like the Russians are particularly happy about that. And so both in terms of cyber and in terms of the physical security satellites, we can kind of see the tactics people are using already on Starship. I'm sorry, on Starlink. And so, yeah, we're using the same kind of cryptography for

making sure that the satellites are secure from that perspective. And then, yeah, anything that approaches the satellite would be very visible. So anything bigger than one inch cube, you could track in space. And so we would see if somebody was tampering with our satellites and it would be considered an act of war. You know, there's this outer space treaty which governs what you kind of can't do.

And that would be considered an act of war on the US. And that's the primary purpose of Space Force. One of the key purposes is to, you know, they're developing interceptors and things to dissuade offensive action. So as we just finished walking through the HQ, seeing the tracking of StarCloud 1, the development of StarCloud 2, and some of the early innings of StarCloud 3, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months? Definitely the thing I'm most looking forward to is the launch of StarCloud 2.

So that's going to happen in January, and it's going to be a huge proof point with the radiators and everything else we've designed in there. Exciting. Well, thank you so much, Philip. Thanks so much for coming. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews.

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