Ezra Feilden
Related people
Episodes
Notes
Sourcery · Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory
-
How Easy Is Booking a Falcon 9 Rideshare?
Ezra Feilden says booking a Falcon 9 rideshare is unbelievably easy. Booking the launch for Starcloud One was basically the first thing the company did, about 21 months ahead. The initial booking can be paid with a credit card, and a confirmation comes straight away.
Earlier rideshare slots were much easier for a single payload. Falcon 9 is being wound down while Starship is not ready yet, so Starcloud is in a crunch for launch. Insurance is relatively inexpensive because Falcon 9 has 300 consecutive launches without a failure. A policy can cover a rocket explosion or a payload that does not separate. Insuring problems on the spacecraft is much harder, because this craft is the first of its
-
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 o
-
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.