# Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory Sourcery · 2026-10-31 · 70 min · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdq6urSx-f8 ## Transcript Molly O'Shea 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. Philip Johnston Well, that’s the satellite we launched in November last year with the first NVIDIA H100s on board. Molly O'Shea Starcloud 1 separation confirmed. Philip Johnston They told us it would cost $75 million to $100 million to do Starcloud 1. 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 U.S. power grid. Ezra Feilden It’s around 2 tons, fully loaded, 235 kilowatts, and we can deploy up to 50 of them per Starship launch. Molly O'Shea Do you think Tesla will merge with SpaceX? Philip Johnston This isn’t a hot take. This is just a fact. SpaceX is going to buy Tesla. Molly O'Shea We’re here at Starcloud in the Seattle region. We’re not going to disclose the exact location because it’s a secret, right, Philip? Philip Johnston Top secret. Molly O'Shea 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. Philip Johnston Welcome to Starcloud. On the screen, we actually have the location of Starcloud 1. That’s the satellite we launched in November last year with the first NVIDIA H100s on board. This little green area shows everywhere on Earth where you have a line of sight to the satellite. That 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. If we come back in half an hour, you’ll probably find it over Africa somewhere. Molly O'Shea Oh my God. Philip Johnston Yeah, it’s moving fast. Molly O'Shea Before we walked over here, it was down here. Did something special happen over here? Philip Johnston Oh, yeah. Molly O'Shea Why? Philip Johnston It actually just came over Cabo, which is where I proposed to my fiancée. It only comes over there once every 3 days, so I waited until 6:00 a.m. and then showed her on the phone, because I’d written the proposal on Starcloud 1. Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston So, yeah. Molly O'Shea It’s cute. Check out the post if you haven’t yet. Okay. All right, we’re going to walk through the facility. Just give us a sense of what we’ll be looking at and what stages of development. Are we going to see Starcloud 1, Starcloud 2, maybe— Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea —Starcloud 3 anywhere close? Philip Johnston Yeah. Starcloud 1 is launched. Starcloud 2 is in the assembly facility. As I say, we’re midway through move-in, so please take it with a pinch of salt. There are boxes everywhere. 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. Then we’ll go through and finish the tour in some of the newer facilities that we’re bringing online next year. Molly O'Shea Awesome. Cool. Philip Johnston Cool. This is the main assembly area for Starcloud 2, and this is the satellite in the background. You can see Starcloud 2. On top, you can see the 2 lasers, and then we have some deployables. It has about a 120-foot wingspan when deployed. We just put this through vibration testing, so this is our vibe table here. A fun story about this vibe table: we couldn’t find a vibe table in the U.S. that would vibe with a pressure vessel on it in the time we needed. The lead time on new vibe tables is almost 2 years now. Molly O'Shea Oh no. Philip Johnston Yeah, and it’s about $1.5 million for a new vibe table, so we bought this secondhand broken vibe table for $200,000. Then the team worked all weekend to fix it up. I don’t know if you can see—maybe we can go around so you can see how janky the amp we bought for it is. Molly O'Shea All right, we have a new entrant on the video. We’re here with Ezra. Ezra is also a co-founder. Do you want to give a couple of sentences on your background? Then we’ll talk about the vibe table. Ezra Feilden For sure. My name’s Ezra Feilden. 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 are a very critical piece of what we’re building here. Before that, I did my PhD in materials engineering. Molly O'Shea Damn. Ezra Feilden We’re standing in front of our vibe table, our very old, very beaten-up vibe table. We had to get this on an extremely short lead time. New vibe tables have a 26-month lead time and cost over a million dollars, and that didn’t work for our schedule. We had to do this test in-house for various reasons, so the only option available to us was to get a secondhand vibe table. This one, I can tell you, has had a life. It’s as old as I am. It came to us filled with water— Molly O'Shea No. Ezra Feilden —and with a horrendous internal leak. There’s very high voltage inside, and obviously it’s vibrating. There are high temperatures, and right in the heart of all of that, there was a very large leak, which is evidently the reason the previous owner sold it. We didn’t realize that until we got it in-house, essentially 2 days before the test. Molly O'Shea Oh my God. Ezra Feilden Through the weekend, evenings and weekends, we had to hustle to tear this thing down right to the core and repair the leak. We had an expert come—basically the country’s expert in vibe tables—and tell us the repair was not possible. We pressed on and got it limping along enough to complete our spacecraft-level vibe test. Molly O'Shea So do you find this on Facebook Marketplace? Where do we find old vibe tables? Ezra Feilden Yeah, it tends to be auction houses, surplus auction houses. When companies go out of business, they get rid of all their assets. There are some diamonds in the rough there, for sure. Philip Johnston It’s not easy to move. It’s about 60 tons. Molly O'Shea Oh my God. Ezra Feilden 16 tons. Philip Johnston Sorry, 16 tons. Yeah, which is— Ezra Feilden Yeah, it’s hefty. To power this thing, we need a generator, so we have a very large generator outside. Molly O'Shea I know when I was pulling up, I thought, “Oh, we’re in kind of a warehouse office park. Which one could possibly be Starcloud?” Ezra Feilden Yeah. Molly O'Shea Probably the one with huge generators outside. Ezra Feilden Yeah. When you have extremely tight timelines and you’re trying to do new things very quickly, you often find yourself in these kinds of situations where you have to get very creative, hustle, and basically not take no for an answer. You have to be incredibly scrappy. That’s our superpower as a startup, I think: the ability to turn these crazy scenarios around and make a success of them. Molly O'Shea It’s a great point, because Starcloud went from founding to orbit in 21 months. Philip Johnston Yeah, which is a record. I think the fastest anybody had done that before us was 4 years, and that was basically because Adi and Ezra built the satellite by hand. We’ll speak with Adi in a minute, but— Molly O'Shea Oh my God. I know this might surprise people. It definitely surprised me, because now I’m doing more of these tours, and the locations aren’t El Segundo or down in Long Beach. You guys are up here in the Seattle region. So why Seattle? Philip Johnston Maybe 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. Ezra and I were literally sitting in El Segundo for the first month of the company, typing into LinkedIn, “Okay, spacecraft thermal engineer.” It was literally going, “Redmond, Redmond, Redmond, Bellevue, Seattle, Redmond, Redmond.” We were like, “Okay, shit, I guess we have to move up.” About half our team formerly worked at SpaceX. The other half came from the hyperscalers, so we have AWS and Azure down the road. For doing data centers in space, this is literally the best place in the world you could be. Molly O'Shea Okay, we’re also joined by another Starcloud co-founder, Adi. Adi, tell us a little bit about your background, and how did you end up here? Adi Oltean Before Starcloud, I was at SpaceX for about 2 years. I was the responsible engineer for a feature called Tracking Beams, which essentially gives Starlink to all in-motion vehicles, including aviation, cruise ships, and even Starship. If you’ve ever seen those cool Starship videos, I helped build that. Before SpaceX, I was at Microsoft for about 2 decades. In the last couple of years, I was working on large-scale GPU deployments in production. Adi Oltean We onboarded the very first large language models, before they were called LLMs, in a bunch of data centers, and worked very closely with NVIDIA on that. It was really rewarding to be part of 2 keynotes at GTC: one in 2019, where Jensen talked about conversational AI. That was— Molly O'Shea Mm. Adi Oltean —what it was called back then. Our demo was part of that keynote. Then later this year, at the same GTC keynote in San Jose, Space-1 was introduced—the first GPU designed to work in space. Molly O'Shea Damn. Yeah, Philip was telling me you’ve been mentioned in GTC talks multiple times. Adi Oltean Not me personally, but our team, yes. I helped build the demo. Molly O'Shea That’s incredible. So we’re standing in front of Starcloud 2. Do you want to give us a little rundown on it? Adi Oltean People are busy at the moment. They’re about to fire the HDRM, which is essentially a latch that will deploy the solar panels on each side of the spacecraft. If you hear a loud pop, that’s it. We’re testing the satellite actively and testing various systems. There you go. Speaker 2 Okay. Adi Oltean So it’s a huge event. Molly O'Shea Oh, really? I was like, something’s gonna explode in here. Adi Oltean Maybe not as climactic as we 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 we can get kilowatts of power to all our compute. Speaker 0 So I know this is a very new facility, but where does that get made? Where are all these components coming from? Is it vertically integrated? How do you think about engineering? Speaker 3 We try to vertically integrate as much as possible. Obviously, we’re not manufacturing the NVIDIA boards or other high-level compute systems, but we integrate everything here. We manufactured our radiators and put together the solar panels. A lot of the cooling system is being built internally here, which is kind of our secret sauce, if you will. Another HDRM firing. We try to integrate as much as possible in-house. Speaker 0 What’s been the biggest technical challenge coming over to Starcloud? Speaker 3 I think the cooling system and the radiators are by far the largest technical challenge. I think we’re very proud of what we did, how it works, and how compact the whole thing is. It’s mostly a focus on engineering costs rather than whether this is possible. We know it’s possible, but— Philip Johnston The question is how you make it super cheap and how you make it manufacturable at scale. Speaker 0 Yeah, I mean, that’s a big point. I was interviewing Sean Maguire, and he was talking about data centers in space. He was like, “I did the math on it, and it makes sense.” The math maths. Philip Johnston Yeah. Speaker 0 A large component of that is energy transfer and how much energy is used on Earth for Earth data centers versus in space. This is going to be a little bit of a different environment. It is very, very cold, but you still need radiators, cooling, all that kind of stuff. Philip Johnston Yes. Speaker 0 So could you explain that out a little bit more? Philip Johnston The engineering math is hard, but the economic math is the one that truly matters in orbit. What you want to do is dissipate every single watt you’re receiving from the sun. That’s the hard part: how to do it very efficiently. How do you essentially emulate a cooling system that mimics the one in data centers today on Earth? As people probably know, 2025 was the year of liquid cooling in all the data centers. People have to switch to liquid cooling because that’s the only way to achieve the incredible densities of compute in next-generation data centers. We’re capitalizing on that and using the same technology in space as well. Speaker 0 Mm-hmm. For those who don’t know about the Fermi Explorer mission, can you explain that and why it’s significant for you? ### The Fermi Explorer Mission Philip Johnston My co-founder, Zadi Hazra, and I have created a nonprofit with a few others, including Cameron Gefaren. We created a nonprofit to send the first spacecraft to the nearest star. The nearest star system to us is Alpha Centauri. It’s about 4 light-years away. We realized after doing Starcloud 1 that you can do things very cheaply. For example, we had a quote from one of the primes. They told us it would cost $75 million to $100 million to do Starcloud 1, and we did it for about $2.5 million. Speaker 0 No way. Philip Johnston Yeah. So we realized you can do things very cheaply, and we found— Speaker 0 You can just put things in space. Philip Johnston Yeah, pretty much. 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 or $15 million. It won’t use any technology that doesn’t exist today. It’s going to use Hall-effect ion thrusters powered by solar energy. We’re going to spiral in toward the sun for 5 years, and then we’re going to fire the thruster at perihelion, or the closest point to the sun, for another 5 years to create these ever-expanding ellipses. On the last firing, we’re just going to fling off in the direction. It’s not even anywhere close to where Alpha Centauri is today. Alpha Centauri is moving toward us, and it will intersect on a path in about 80,000 years. The hope is it will be both the first to leave on this journey to another star and also the last to arrive. So, hopefully, in 50 or 100 years, there’ll be better propulsion technology. In 1,000 years, we’ll have much better propulsion technology. I hope stuff starts flying past us. By the time we arrive in 80,000 years, maybe there will have been a colony for 15,000 years, even if your propulsion technology was only 20% faster. Speaker 0 Yeah. Philip Johnston What I hope happens is they applaud our spacecraft across the finish line. They capture it and put it in a museum or something. From there, it’ll take 5 to 10 million years to settle the galaxy, even with just today’s technology. Then it’s about a billion years to get to Andromeda, our nearest galaxy. From there, it’s about another 5 billion years to get to the local group of 50 galaxies. The purpose for me of doing it is that either all of that happens or it doesn’t, for some reason. There’s this idea of the Fermi paradox: the question of why we don’t see more intelligence in our galaxy or more obvious evidence of it. Speaker 0 You mean aliens. Philip Johnston Yeah. Or why our solar system isn’t part of a galactic empire. Speaker 0 Yeah. Philip Johnston It’s pretty quick: 10 million years to settle the galaxy is the blink of an eye in galactic time frames. If there had been intelligent life on any other star in our galaxy—there are a trillion, trillion planets in our galaxy—and there had been intelligent life on any other one in the last 10 billion years, then it would have taken 5 million years to settle the whole galaxy. The galaxy has been around for more than 10 billion years, so it’s really concerning that we don’t see more evidence of that. To me, there are 2 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 group of 50 galaxies—or intelligent life doesn’t last very long. By the way, I’m open to the idea that we’re exceptionally rare. I like that idea. Maybe we’re going to be the first to settle the galaxy, and that’s a great privilege. Speaker 0 Damn. Philip Johnston Maybe there’s been intelligent life on many other stars in our galaxy, and for some reason it doesn’t survive very long. Either way, I think we should know about that. One of the reasons to do this mission is to make people think more about our place in the galaxy, the Fermi paradox, and other things. Speaker 0 How did you get into space, and how did you get interested in this? Philip Johnston I’ve always been interested in space. I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, like anybody. Speaker 0 But why? What exposed you to that? Philip Johnston I guess sci-fi movies when I was a kid. I read the Asimov novels, the Foundation series. There’s a phrase that people sometimes say: “We’re too late to explore the Earth, and we’re too early to explore the solar system and the galaxy.” I always thought that was really sad. It was exciting to me to be an explorer, and the voyages across the globe were exciting to me. Realizing, okay, we’ve explored everything now, everything’s done, was kind of sad. Recently, I started thinking, “Maybe we can make our own effort. Maybe we can be the first to send a spacecraft to the nearest star.” What an incredible privilege that would be. Speaker 0 So if you wrote a sentimental note on Starcloud 1, what are you gonna put on the spacecraft? Philip Johnston I’m definitely gonna put the name of my fiancée on there. So, for the low, low price of— Molly O'Shea The low, low… Oh, you’re going to start selling logo spots? Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah. Molly O'Shea Wow. We’ve got an advertising option. Philip Johnston Yeah, there you go. People can go to fem explorer.com/donate, and they 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. We’ll have some scientific payloads on there, and we’ll have the Golden Record, which is one of the artworks they put on one of the probes going out of the solar system. But we’ll also have a solicitation period for various artistic payloads, like artworks that people can put on there. We’re drawing ideas from various places. One cool scientific payload—did you ever see this fruit fly that Google—or, there was a startup. They cut— Molly O'Shea The brain. Philip Johnston They sliced the brain of a fruit fly. Molly O'Shea Yeah. Mm-hmm. Philip Johnston Yeah, so we’ll put a digital copy of that, this fruit fly thing. Molly O'Shea Whoever finds this is going to be like, “Humans, they’re tiny.” Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Molly O'Shea This— Philip Johnston They’ll be like, “How the hell did they build this?” Molly O'Shea This made this? Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah, yeah. Molly O'Shea That’s awesome. All right. I have to address this because every time… 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’s your hottest take? ### SpaceX and Tesla Predictions Philip Johnston 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. Molly O'Shea But you were right, and it rocked. Philip Johnston I was totally right. I was 100% right. Molly O'Shea Okay. Philip Johnston What was my hottest take? Let’s stick with the theme. 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. Molly O'Shea You do? Philip Johnston Yes. Molly O'Shea If all goes to plan and there’s no World War, you believe— Philip Johnston That’s my hottest take. Molly O'Shea —SpaceX will be worth more than $100 trillion. Philip Johnston Correct. Molly O'Shea Okay. Well, that’ll be good for business. Philip Johnston Yeah, exactly. Molly O'Shea What would make that up, though? Break that down. How do you think about it? Philip Johnston Actually, a good chunk of it will come from the fact that Tesla’s Optimus will be up and running. Once Optimus is building Optimus factories, you have this incredible exponential growth. The rate of growth for all of manufacturing will increase a lot once Optimus is producing Optimuses. It’s a bit like what’s happening now with recursive self-improvement, but for the physical world. Molly O'Shea Do you think Tesla will merge with SpaceX, which will help with that? Philip Johnston This isn’t a hot take. This is just a fact. Molly O'Shea Okay. Philip Johnston SpaceX is going to buy Tesla, and they have to wait until the stock unlocks, because if they do it now, everyone’s going to say the price wasn’t fair. At the moment, you’re not going to see too many announcements, but I think there’s a Roadster announcement tonight. Molly O'Shea Mm. Philip Johnston Beyond that, I don’t think you’re going to see any announcements about Optimus for the next year. Then once they do the merger, we’ll hear a lot more. Molly O'Shea I know this will come out after the Roadster announcement, but what’s your prediction? Philip Johnston What I’ve heard is they have these cold-gas thrusters from the spacecraft. They have a compressor that’s compressing air, essentially, and then that’s being fired out the back, which gives you absurd acceleration and cornering and everything else. And also, I think— Molly O'Shea Lift? Philip Johnston Lift. Yeah. I actually think you can get lift on these things. Molly O'Shea Oh my gosh. Philip Johnston What do you think? Molly O'Shea I kind of thought it might be an eVTOL. Philip Johnston That would be wild, but I don’t think it is. Molly O'Shea You don’t think it is? Philip Johnston We would know by now if it’s an eVTOL. Molly O'Shea Think you could just skip the whole car thing and go straight to eVTOL, call it a Roadster? Philip Johnston That would be amazing. That would be incredible, but I’d be extremely surprised if it’s an eVTOL. Molly O'Shea All right. Stay tuned for our predictions. Oh my God. I don’t know. This one is a little bit more than length. Philip Johnston Length and girth. Length and girth. Molly O'Shea That’s crazy. Philip Johnston Yeah, so— Molly O'Shea So what do you use this for? What— Philip Johnston This— Molly O'Shea What do you use this for? Philip Johnston This is for screwing in bolts— Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston —at the very— Molly O'Shea That’s crazy. Philip Johnston Anyway. Molly O'Shea Where did you find this? Philip Johnston I went to a Halloween store this morning because I was— Molly O'Shea Oh, okay. Philip Johnston I was like, well— Molly O'Shea Well, that’s actually pretty impressive for a Halloween store. Philip Johnston I can’t be sword mugged by the rest— Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston —of your guests. Molly O'Shea That’s wild. Okay, so we just finished the vibe table. We finished looking at Starcloud 2. Now you want to go into— Philip Johnston We’ll go to the fab shop so we can see where we’re welding and fabricating various aluminum and steel parts, some for the actual spacecraft, and most for test equipment and other things. Maybe Ezra can talk a bit about the fab shop. ### Building Starcloud 3 Ezra Feilden Yeah, this is a big upgrade from our last facility. We’ve literally just moved in here over the last few days, so everything’s a little bit chaotic. We moved from this tiny office building into this lovely manufacturing space. This area is what we call the fab shop. This is where we do dirtier work. The cleaner work goes on in there; the dirtier work happens here. We’re talking sheet-metal work, welding, and general fabrication. We have lots of fab-shop equipment here: MIG welding, TIG welding, laser welding, and a shear for sheet metal. Right here we have the manufacturing demonstrator for Starcloud 3. Starcloud 3 is our largest platform. It’s a 2-ton vehicle, approximately. We wanted to get some experience building a primary structure at the scale of our Starcloud 3 vehicle. This vehicle is designed to go through the PEZ dispenser door for Starship. It’s around 2 tons fully loaded, 235 kilowatts, and we can deploy up to 50 of them per Starship launch. Molly O'Shea My God. Ezra Feilden So this is the Starcloud 3 manufacturing demonstrator. Per layer, you get 2 of these. Molly O'Shea Wide, and then— Ezra Feilden Two wide, and then 25 tall. Molly O'Shea Oh my God. Ezra Feilden So it’s from here to the ceiling, with these stacked in two rows. Molly O'Shea So right now we’re in the middle of Starship. We’re inside of it. Ezra Feilden Yeah. Yeah. Molly O'Shea Okay. Ezra Feilden Yeah, that gives you an idea of the diameter of Starship, the fact that this can fit in there. It’s an enormous vehicle. Molly O'Shea Where have you guys been launching to date? What are the launches? I know you have 3 launches coming up as well. Ezra Feilden Mm-hmm. Our first launch was with Falcon 9, a Falcon 9 rideshare mission. Our upcoming launches are all with Falcon. It’s really hard to beat the benefits and 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. Molly O'Shea What’s the process like for booking a ride? Ezra Feilden Booking rideshare is unbelievably easy. It was basically the first thing we did as a company: we booked the launch for Starcloud 1. Molly O'Shea Do you have to book it really far in advance? How does that work? You’re gunning to get on the vehicle, but how does that work? Ezra Feilden We booked about 21 months in advance. The initial booking is—you can pay for it with a credit card and get a confirmation straight away. Philip Johnston You could. Ezra Feilden You could. Molly O'Shea Could. Philip Johnston Yeah. Ezra Feilden Falcon 9 rideshare is going away, though. These were the rosy days, when it was much easier to get a single payload launched. We’re in a transitional 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 when it comes to launch. Molly O'Shea What’s the process for that, though? Do you need insurance? What happens if it doesn’t go to plan? Ezra Feilden Insurance is relatively inexpensive for Falcon 9 because it has such a strong track record: 300 consecutive launches without a failure. You can insure against a failure on launch—if the rocket explodes or the payload doesn’t separate, that kind of thing. It’s much more difficult to insure against things going wrong with the spacecraft, since this is the first spacecraft of its type to be built. Molly O'Shea Mm. Ezra Feilden We got insurance for the launch, and if something goes wrong, that can give you a bit of a financial payout. But what it can’t compensate you for is lost time, which is really the most valuable resource for a fast-moving startup. I’m slightly on the fence about the value of insuring payloads, but we’ll take it case by case. Molly O'Shea We were just at Rocket Lab, and we did a tour. We did a series there, and the one topic that keeps getting delayed is Neutron. Ezra Feilden Mm-hmm. Molly O'Shea How do you think that will or won’t affect the market if and when it starts to be serviceable? Ezra Feilden Yeah. Just yesterday, they publicly announced that the first flight will be in 2027. Composite manufacturing is really hard. I know from personal experience that very large composite structures often take a bit longer than you expect, especially when you’re producing them and running the tooling for the first time. I have a lot of faith that Rocket Lab can get Neutron flying regularly. They’ve proven they can scale, with 100 launches of Electron. We’re definitely rooting for them as well. Molly O'Shea All right. So now we’re walking around here. You have a motorcycle. We’re going to go look at that. Philip Johnston We can look at it if you want. Molly O'Shea Whose is that? Philip Johnston I think it is—I think it’s Bailey’s. Molly O'Shea It was a joke, by the way. Does that go into space? Philip Johnston Yeah, maybe. Depends how fast they’re going. Molly O'Shea Everyone’s laughing. Philip Johnston I’m permanently terrified that somebody’s going to kill themselves on a motorbike. Molly O'Shea Oh, no. Yeah, that is a liability. Philip Johnston Half our team is—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 axes, and the deployable for Starcloud 2 runs down this. This is one half of it. Molly O'Shea Oh, wow. Philip Johnston The other half goes on that side. It’s a 120-foot-long deployable. Molly O'Shea Oh, my God. Philip Johnston That small package you saw there extends down the length of this. Molly O'Shea What? Philip Johnston And then down the length of that on the other side. Molly O'Shea Oh, my God. Okay, so— Philip Johnston The first few segments of that are a radiator segment. That’s the radiator we designed and fabricated in-house. As Adi was mentioning, our design is way more efficient than any other. When we launch in January, it’ll be by far the largest commercial deployable radiator in space. The nearest comparison is the International Space Station. Our radiator has at least 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator, and about 500 times less cost per watt of dissipation. The ISS is an easy benchmark to beat on cost, but on mass, it’s quite an achievement. Molly O'Shea One of the biggest topics, and I know we talked about this with Adi, is the economics of this. You’re making more economical satellites going out into space, and the vehicle itself. I’d love to break down the economics there, and then further drill down into the difference between terrestrial data centers and orbital ones. ### Orbital Data Center Economics Philip Johnston The whole thing is actually contingent on the launch cost. If the launch cost gets below around $500 a kilo, then it will be much cheaper to do this in space than terrestrially. A good comparison is if you build a new solar project on Earth to power a data center, because solar is the cheapest form of energy we have terrestrially. The way you can think about it is that solar terrestrially has 3 big costs. The biggest cost is the cost of permitted land, depending on where you are. The second-biggest cost is battery storage and backup power, and the last cost is the solar cells themselves. In space, we don’t need permitted land, so your biggest cost is gone. We don’t need batteries and backup power because we’re in the sun 24/7. And we need 8 times fewer solar cells, because 1 square meter of solar panel in space produces about 8 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 that’s where the trade-off comes in. When you run those numbers, you come out to about $500 a kilo, where it makes more sense to do it in space than terrestrially. Of course, right now with Falcon 9, we’re at about $5,000 a kilo. Starship is designed to produce launch costs—internal launch costs for SpaceX—of around $20 to $40 a kilo. So as long as they pass that launch cost through to us at anything less than, say, 10 times their marginal launch cost, or even more, that makes sense for us. Right now, on Falcon 9, they charge 2 or 3 times their marginal launch cost, so that seems reasonable. Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea Another thing I listened to—I listened to a handful of your interviews—is that one of the other very concerning points is chips and chip failures. How does that work into the model? Philip Johnston For sure. It’s actually a super relevant point. I think it’s even more relevant and pertinent than cooling, which people think is the biggest challenge. We’ve basically solved the cooling challenge. The other part we’re working on is radiation shielding and testing all the chips in different particle accelerators to make sure they can survive the radiation environment in space. The reason we put so much time into that is that if the chips have a 10% or 20% higher failure rate in space than they do on the ground, then the whole economics of the model fall apart. The chips are by far the most expensive part of what we’re doing. There are a few ways you can work around that. Essentially, we’re not going to have access to the satellites once they’ve launched, so they’ll operate a bit like Starlink satellites do: you need redundancy on critical systems, like pumps, and you over-provision things that fail over time. For example, you’re going to lose a few percent of the solar panels per year, so you slightly over-provision that. On the chips, we have a longer burn-in period on the ground. Molly O'Shea Why is that? Philip Johnston I don’t know. It’s basically what they call infant mortality of the chips. Molly O'Shea Oh, no. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea Oh, my God. Philip Johnston I know, it sounds kind of terrible. Molly O'Shea That’s horrible. Philip Johnston Yeah. What you want is to get through the infancy period and find out about all those failures. For Starcloud-2, we had a 3-month burn-in period. It basically means you run the chips hot for 3 months so you can find all those failures early. If the chips can survive 3 months at full power, the chance they’ll have a failure from that point onwards diminishes very dramatically, compared with the chance they’ll have a failure in the first 3 months. Molly O'Shea So you have 5 chips up in space right now, including one H100? Philip Johnston Yes. Molly O'Shea What are they doing? Philip Johnston We have 3 chips from NVIDIA, 2 from Arm, and we also have some CPUs from AMD on Starcloud-1. And what they’re doing is, at the moment, we used 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. They’re mainly in a test phase, but we’re doing inference on satellite imagery, including synthetic aperture radar data and hyperspectral data. We’ll make an announcement about some of the results, but we’ve got some very interesting results. The use case 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 it 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 if there’s a vessel crossing some boundary. At the moment, they take an enormous amount of imagery and then have to wait at least an hour and a half to get to a ground station. Then they try to downlink as much as they can, but usually that’s not very much. Once we’re in space, we have a bunch of optical terminals on our satellite. They can send data to us in real time. We can then run the inference workloads on our satellite and downlink the coordinates of a vessel, for example, in minutes rather than hours or days, which is the current way this works. Molly O'Shea That’s wild. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea Oh my gosh. So are the initial use cases for these satellites and what they’re doing right now the satellite operators and that kind of data? When do you think it’ll reach out into other parts of the economy? Philip Johnston It’s entirely dependent on the launch cost hitting $500 a kilo. The business as it is today runs economically with the current launch price. Molly O'Shea Mm. Philip Johnston In order to be competitive with terrestrial data centers on energy and infrastructure cost, we need the launch cost to be $500 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. From 2028 onwards, we’re hoping to see SpaceX selling capacity to commercial customers. If they don’t, we’re also considering other options, and we’ve booked on a bunch of other launch vehicles, not just Falcon 9. We announced Stoke and Firefly already, and we’ll announce some others soon. Molly O'Shea Congrats. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea 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? Philip Johnston Very large data centers on Earth are usually used for training large models. 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 things together. Most of the workloads we’re going to be doing in space are inference, usually for things like coding agents, back-office business-processing agents, and ChatGPT queries. The roadmap is that we launch a bunch of things like this. For 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. We’ve filed with the SEC for a constellation of 88,000 of those. Molly O'Shea That’s crazy. Philip Johnston Yeah. And that’s just the first 88,000. Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston So that— Molly O'Shea Just the first 88,000. Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah. I mean, we’re not stopping there. That enables us to deploy the first 20 gigawatts. Molly O'Shea Mm-hmm. Philip Johnston 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. Once we run out of that, we can go to cislunar, MEO, beyond GEO, and the Lagrange points. Essentially, if you want to scale much more compute, then you really need to do it in space. Molly O'Shea So will we have access to sunlight on Earth if we have so many solar panels up? Philip Johnston Yes. Molly O'Shea We will? Philip Johnston And the reason is— Molly O'Shea ’Cause I saw—was it Starcloud-3? It’s four— Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah. Molly O'Shea —square kilometers— Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea —in orbit on his— Philip Johnston Yes. Starcloud-3 will take a while before we can start docking together these large structures, but even when we do, they won’t ever cast a shadow on the Earth. The reason is they’re flying over the poles. So if this is the Sun, and this is Earth, Earth’s spinning on its axis, and they fly over the poles like this. The Earth will never create a shadow on our satellite, and our satellite will never create a shadow on Earth. They never go behind or in front of Earth, basically. Molly O'Shea The more you know. Philip Johnston The more you know. Molly O'Shea Science. So, Philip, we’re back at the vibe table and we’re about to do some testing. Do you want to explain this? ### Testing Spacecraft for Launch Philip Johnston Yeah. We need to simulate the launch environment. In order for SpaceX to allow us to launch on a rocket with multiple tenants, they want to make sure that nothing’s going to fly off any individual satellite during launch. They also don’t want any satellite to resonate at a certain frequency and throw the whole stack off. The point of the vibe table is to put the satellite through every different frequency and amplitude it’s going to experience during launch, and also through this shock test. That way, we make sure nothing flies off and that we don’t have resonance at a certain frequency. Molly O'Shea How long do you run it for? Philip Johnston It depends on the test, but the launch environment itself is about seven minutes. There are some tests we would run for a few minutes. Most tests we run for a shorter period. We run random vibe a bit longer, but the shock test we run for a shorter period. Molly O'Shea Have you ever— Philip Johnston Sat on a vibe table? Molly O'Shea Sat on that? Philip Johnston I have never sat on that, I have to say. People— Molly O'Shea Had to ask. I’ve touched them before, but— Philip Johnston Oh, yeah? Molly O'Shea We were at Zipline, and we went into their testing room. They had a vibe table and these RC propeller fans to test the drones with. They would fly them in front of it and see if anything would get fragile or break, if there were any fractures. It ended up just being me walking through RC fans. Philip Johnston No way. Molly O'Shea Which, I think they go, like, 80 miles an hour. Philip Johnston Wow. Speaker 0 Yeah. Philip Johnston Crazy. Oh, there you go. Speaker 0 Oh. Philip Johnston So this is a very low-frequency test. We’re doing it at a low frequency mainly so that you can see what it looks like when it moves. When it moves faster, you won’t be able to see it moving. They’re moving at least 50 hertz, so 50 times back and forth per second. This is basically a huge solenoid, a huge magnet that’s pulling this thing in and out. It’s speeding up now. I guess— Speaker 0 Should we walk in? Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah. We’re good. Speaker 2 The hardware we have on the table at the moment is part of our thermal management system, called the accumulator. We have liquid cooling on Starcloud 2 and all of our future vehicles. As the liquid heats up, it wants to expand, so you have to have a component that allows that expansion to take place. Otherwise, you’ll burst your cooling system. That’s what the accumulator does. It allows for the thermal expansion of the fluid and manages the pressure inside the cooling system. What we have on the table right now is the accumulator for Starcloud 2. Speaker 0 Yep. Yep. Speaker 2 We good? Yeah, go for it. Philip Johnston Yeah. There you go. Speaker 0 Oh my God. Philip Johnston Right? Speaker 0 That’s crazy. Philip Johnston Yeah, so the test it’s doing right now is what’s called a sine sweep. It goes through every different frequency and amplitude that the satellite will experience during launch. It starts at a very low frequency. We’re doing it at a 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 it moving. Speaker 0 What is the worst thing that a vibe table has done? Philip Johnston The worst thing that a vibe table—what? Speaker 0 Has a vibe table, like, ever—has a magnet shot out or anything? Philip Johnston 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. For example, underneath Starcloud 2, we have this xenon tank for the thrusters. If the xenon tank explodes, it’s about half the explosive power of a hand grenade. Speaker 0 Great. Philip Johnston So, yeah. Speaker 0 That’s awesome. That’s really good to know. Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah. Speaker 0 Okay. Philip Johnston That’s why we’re not doing that test today. So— Speaker 0 Yeah. Philip Johnston Normally— Speaker 0 So does everyone leave the building when you test that? Philip Johnston Yeah. Speaker 0 Okay. Philip Johnston Literally everybody leaves the building. We put this entire satellite on this. By the way, you can see it’s in two axes, so the solenoid can flip up and we can test it like this, in different axes. When we fire that test up, everybody has to leave the building. Speaker 0 I doubt the toy manufacturer that has storage across the street has any idea what’s going on in here. Philip Johnston They have no idea. Speaker 0 They have no idea. Philip Johnston But they’re far enough away that we know they’re good. Speaker 0 They’re gonna be okay. Philip Johnston They’re safe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 0 Yeah. Like, why is everyone running out? Philip Johnston Yeah. That’s first mode. That’ll be the first mode. Yeah. Oh, okay, okay. No. 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. Speaker 0 Okay. Philip Johnston So it cannot resonate at anything less than 40 times a second. The reason for that is, let’s say it would resonate at twice a second, then the whole thing’s gonna go back and forth like this. Speaker 0 Yeah. Philip Johnston And that will move all the other payloads in the stack. Speaker 0 That’s a really good point. So what is the process to get your spacecraft, or any kind of components, tested for space to make sure that it’s viable for Falcon 9 or Starship? Philip Johnston Yeah. As we mentioned, booking is just putting your credit card down. But then that kicks off a whole long process. On the regulatory side, we have to file with the FCC for the orbit and the spectrum we’re gonna use, and we have to have a de-orbit procedure and all these kinds of things. SpaceX has a whole laundry list of requirements, mainly to make sure that your spacecraft isn’t gonna destroy any other spacecraft on the stack. 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 gonna move the whole stack or have things flying off and killing other spacecraft. Speaker 0 Damn. Philip Johnston Yeah. Speaker 0 So how do they actually verify your approvals or your checklists? Philip Johnston We have to do vibe testing, and then we send them the vibe reports— Speaker 0 Okay. Philip Johnston —after we’ve done the vibe testing. Speaker 0 Has anybody ever lied? Philip Johnston I don’t think so. It would be quite hard to lie. Reproducing these vibe reports would be quite a challenge. Speaker 0 I don’t know why you would do that unless you’re an op. Philip Johnston Unless you’re an op. Speaker 0 Unless you’re an op. Philip Johnston There you go. Speaker 0 Geez. I think we just uncovered something. All right, so we’re walking through to the laser lab. Philip Johnston Yeah. Speaker 0 How many people work at Starcloud? Philip Johnston Right now it’s 30 people at Starcloud. Speaker 0 Wow. That’s it? Philip Johnston That’s it. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 0 Oh my God. Philip Johnston Only 2 are non-engineers. 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 kickass engineering team on planet Earth. This will become a full laser lab, so we’ll use this for cutting and welding aluminum and things. We have a little demo for you. Speaker 0 Make things go zap. Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah. Speaker 0 Hi. Philip Johnston This is Camilo, who’s— Speaker 0 Do we wanna give you a mic and you can talk through it? Or do you wanna talk? Camilo Lopez I can just do the, you know— Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah. You can have a little word. Speaker 0 Demo. Camilo Lopez So this is our CNC xTool laser cutter. We use this to do quick prototyping on different types of materials. It gives us a lot of flexibility to get things done as fast as possible. Right now I just have a little demo with some 30-thou stainless. Sorry for the compressor. It’s a little loud. You’ll see how fast this can do very complex cuts, and it’s extremely accurate. So I’ll— Speaker 0 I’m nervous. Camilo Lopez —run a quick demo here. Speaker 0 I always get nervous for these. Philip Johnston If you wanna get the camera in there, you can probably— Speaker 0 Here, you can go in there, Brett. Philip Johnston —you can get a shot, yeah. Camilo Lopez Yeah, I’ll hand this back to you. Speaker 0 Oh, thanks. Camilo Lopez All right. Ready? Go. Speaker 0 Fire. Yeah, I can’t see. There’s too much reflection. Philip Johnston You’ll see it here, yeah. Camilo Lopez And then it’s done. Speaker 0 Oh my God. It’s so cute. Camilo Lopez Yeah. Philip Johnston It’s a little present for you. Speaker 0 That’s awesome. Camilo Lopez Little samples. I got some here that are ready. Stuff like this helps a lot to move quickly, and it gives us a lot of flexibility. This is just a start. We’re gonna get much larger professional machines. Speaker 0 Wow. Is this your favorite tool? Camilo Lopez One of them. Speaker 0 One of them? Camilo Lopez The next one’s gonna be my favorite. Speaker 0 What is it? Camilo Lopez It’s gonna be an AMADA fiber laser cutter. Speaker 0 Mm-hmm. Camilo Lopez So that we can fit material that’s up to, I believe, 5 by 10 feet. It’s a professional-grade laser cutter, so it’s gonna be significantly more capable than this one. Speaker 0 Damn. That’s fun. Camilo Lopez Yeah. Speaker 0 Thank you. Camilo Lopez Of course. Philip Johnston And as I understand, you yourself— Speaker 0 Oh, really? Okay. Camilo Lopez Yeah. Speaker 0 I get to keep it. Philip Johnston I can take it if you want me to put it in my pocket. I’ll take— Speaker 0 Here, I’ll give it to Brett. All right, so we walked through— Philip Johnston The fab shop, the assembly area— Speaker 0 —the fab shop, assembly area, laser. Philip Johnston We’ve got—we’ll be assembling a clean room, which I don’t think we showed you, but that’s on the other side. As I understand, you yourself are actually a proficient welder. Is that true? Speaker 0 I made a very bold claim, but I did learn how to weld in college, and— Philip Johnston I think we should put this to the test. Speaker 0 I’m down to try. Philip Johnston I think your viewers would find this very exciting. Speaker 0 I am down to try. I was called a prodigy, so we’ll see if that’s still the case. Philip Johnston We’ll find out. We’ll find out. We have some welding materials back here. Shall we get you in a— Speaker 0 Sure. Do I have to change or anything? Philip Johnston You might. Yeah, you need to change. Speaker 0 Okay. 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 gonna show us today, and what’s your background? Miguel Rivera Yeah, so we’re gonna do a little bit of 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, and stainless steel. We’re set up for MIG welding right now, so we’re gonna have you run some beads and make some sparks. Before here, I was the welder for Helion Energy, where we built fusion generators. I ran their fabrication shop for over a year. Before that, I’d been working at a lot of different fab shops, doing architectural and structural welding and fabrication. Before that, I spent a decade in the US Army, deploying overseas. Speaker 0 Oh my God. How did you get into welding? Miguel Rivera I wanted to do something very different. I wanted to do something that was neutral, 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. Miguel Rivera He said— Molly O'Shea Yeah. Miguel Rivera The United States really needs welders, and it needs people to build stuff with their hands. I was like, “Well, I can build stuff with my hands.” So that led me to this career path, which has been very rewarding. Molly O'Shea It’s very satisfying. Miguel Rivera Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Molly O'Shea It’s a little addicting. Miguel Rivera Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Philip Johnston That sounds like you. Molly O'Shea I know. Philip Johnston You posted recently on X. Somebody was like, “America needs more welders,” and you were posting stuff about how good you are at welding. Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston So now we’re gonna find out. Molly O'Shea Now we’re gonna find out. I used to be very good. For background, this isn’t at all in this world, but I went to college for studio art. 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 the first year of studio art, you do every discipline, every practice. In one of them, we did metalwork, woodwork, glassblowing— Miguel Rivera Nice. Molly O'Shea —all of the fun flame stuff. It was so fun. Philip Johnston It’s a lot of fun, yeah. Molly O'Shea And then I thought, well, making this for fun isn’t really a job, you know? You might as well be doing that at trade school. I don’t really understand that, but it was so much fun. Miguel Rivera Nice. Molly O'Shea And I was called a prodigy, so. Miguel Rivera We will see. Philip Johnston We’re about to find out. Miguel Rivera So what we’re gonna do is give you a little bit of PPE so the sparks can’t burn you. Just put this jacket on, and we’re gonna give you some gloves. Molly O'Shea Should I tie my hair back? Miguel Rivera If you keep your hair— Molly O'Shea I don’t know how to tie my hair back, but— Miguel Rivera —in the jacket, you might be fine. Molly O'Shea Oh, I’ll just keep it in, yeah. Miguel Rivera Yeah, as long as it’s behind you, you’re fine. And make sure you button at least a couple of the buttons. Molly O'Shea I’ll button all of them. Miguel Rivera As long as you have all this on and closed-toe shoes, you’ll be just fine. If you feel anything hot, just stop and step back, but you should be perfectly fine. Molly O'Shea Okay. Yeah, I remember we weren’t allowed to wear any polyester. Miguel Rivera Mm-hmm. Yeah, perfect. And then you can do your sleeves as well. Molly O'Shea You haven’t done any of this? Why? Because you— Miguel Rivera Busy guy. He’s never here. Molly O'Shea Oh my God. Philip Johnston Traveling the world. Molly O'Shea That’s true. Philip Johnston Oh, yeah. Molly O'Shea He’s always on stage somewhere. Why aren’t you in the shop? Miguel Rivera So we’ll have you put this on first. The way you put it on, it goes over your head, and you click this. 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. Molly O'Shea Okay. Miguel Rivera So you don’t have to worry about doing anything. All you have to do is put it on, crank this down— Molly O'Shea Okay. Let me— Miguel Rivera —and you’ll be ready to go. Molly O'Shea —try to do this part. Miguel Rivera Do this one first. Yep. I’m gonna put on some PPE, too. Philip Johnston Do you have any kind of gloves? I’m gonna be quite far back, but— Miguel Rivera You can use the same one right there. Philip Johnston This one? Miguel Rivera Yep, you can put that on. Philip Johnston Okay, there you go. Molly O'Shea Who is she? Miguel Rivera Very nice. Molly O'Shea That one, my hand skipped a little bit. Miguel Rivera Yep, that’s fine. Still— Philip Johnston Beautiful. Miguel Rivera —counts. We can do one more if you want. Molly O'Shea Okay, one more. Philip Johnston All right, last one. This is one that counts. Molly O'Shea All right. Miguel Rivera Stay nice and tight. Molly O'Shea A little bit closer. Miguel Rivera Closer. Nice. All right, you’re hired. Molly O'Shea Not bad. Philip Johnston Bang. Miguel Rivera Good job. Molly O'Shea Let’s go. Miguel Rivera Nice. Molly O'Shea America needs welders. Miguel Rivera Woo! Philip Johnston Nice job. Molly O'Shea Cool. Thank you, Miguel. Miguel Rivera You’re very welcome. Molly O'Shea This was so much fun. Miguel Rivera Good job. Molly O'Shea That’s my real reaction. On a scale of 1 to 10, what are we talking about here? Philip Johnston Thanks, Miguel. Appreciate it. Miguel Rivera You’re a solid five. Molly O'Shea Wow. Miguel Rivera I’ve seen guys who’ve been making welds for 10 years and don’t do a job like that. Molly O'Shea Damn. Philip Johnston Damn. There you go. Molly O'Shea That’s pretty good. Miguel Rivera You guys pay attention and take good instructions. Molly O'Shea That’s right, we do. Philip Johnston Damn. Molly O'Shea That’s great. Cool, thank you. Philip Johnston 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— Molly O'Shea Yeah, let’s go over there. So we just did the welding, and— Philip Johnston You crushed it. Molly O'Shea —I’m a five out of 10. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea But— Philip Johnston He didn’t say out of 10. It could be out of five. Molly O'Shea He did say out of 10. Philip Johnston Did he? Molly O'Shea Yes. Philip Johnston I thought he said, “You’re a solid five.” Molly O'Shea No, he said, “You’re a solid five out of 10.” Philip Johnston Did he? Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston Oh, okay, okay, okay. Yeah. Molly O'Shea It’s like, damn. That’s pretty good. Okay, I was wondering, how does the flow change in terms 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? Philip Johnston Yeah. Most people you can see are engineers, and we have all the engineers make sure that they’re hands-on with the satellite as well. Half the time these people will be upstairs designing stuff on CAD; the other half of the time they’re down here fiddling with wires and testing stuff. We also have a technician team. That was Miguel. We’ve got four technicians— Miguel Rivera These are rough numbers. Philip Johnston —some more coming on soon. Miguel Rivera But this will be— Philip Johnston Maybe five now. I don’t wanna get it wrong. Their job is welding and fabrication, actually producing the satellite. Miguel’s team produced and fabricated the whole compute module here, an aluminum box, in-house. Molly O'Shea And I am contributing to that. Philip Johnston You are contributing a huge amount. Molly O'Shea Whenever you need me, let me know. I can come on. Philip Johnston For your listeners, it is official: you have now done more welding at Starcloud than I have. Molly O'Shea Wow. You gotta really visit Miguel. I think he’s waiting for you to put in some work. Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah, he will. Molly O'Shea You’re not doing enough. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea 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. Bailey Montaño You bet. I’m the engineering manager here at Starcloud. What we’re doing right now is a leak check of the prop system. We have a fully fueled electric propulsion system—an ion thruster—and we’re testing it after vibe to make sure that we didn’t introduce any cracks or other leaks during the vibe test. Molly O'Shea How did you come here? How did you get to Starcloud? Bailey Montaño It was a bit of a long journey. I started my career in aerospace at SpaceX. I spent about 4 years there. Then I did a couple of other side quests in biotech and consumer product design. Those didn’t really stick. I moved on to fusion energy, which was really cool, but at the end of that 3-year stint, I realized I’m a space nerd; I need to be working on space to be happy. Fortunately, living in Seattle, there are a ton of cool companies in the area. But Starcloud really stuck out. Back then they had a different name, and I got in contact with the founders super early on. The rest is history. Molly O'Shea What’s your favorite thing about Philip? Philip Johnston You can’t do that. You can’t do that. Molly O'Shea I know, I know. What do you hate about him? Philip Johnston What’s your least favorite thing about him? Molly O'Shea Yeah, what do you hate about him? What’s your least favorite— We don’t say hate. Bailey Montaño Got it. Molly O'Shea What’s your biggest challenge with Philip over here? Does he not give you enough attention? What’s going on? Bailey Montaño No, definitely not that. Molly O'Shea Let’s work this out on camera. Bailey Montaño It would be… It’s a two-sided coin, or whatever, but the office is very busy with tours and things like that all the time. Molly O'Shea We gotta go. Philip Johnston Yeah, there you go. There you go. Molly O'Shea The interview’s over. Philip Johnston There you go. Molly O'Shea The interview’s over. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea He’s like, “I have to work.” Bailey Montaño It’s good and bad. Molly O'Shea Stop interviewing me. Philip Johnston That was the politest way to tell you to fuck off. Molly O'Shea My God. Damn, Bailey, give me the mic. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea Oh, that’s funny. Okay. Philip Johnston Appreciate it. Molly O'Shea So what are you most looking forward to? What is your favorite part of the process? Bailey Montaño I think the next thing I’m looking forward to most is obviously the launch, for sure. Bailey Montaño I’m going to be tremendously proud of this. A lot of blood, sweat, and literal tears went into this thing. Molly O'Shea Mm. Bailey Montaño As far as the whole design process goes, I’d say testing is my favorite part. That’s where the rubber really hits the road. The recent vibration test was a really big one, and the cooling system was another. When we were in Colorado not long ago, that was our first full-up, integrated test of the whole cooling system, which was my baby from day one. It was really cool to see that up and running, too. Philip Johnston Everybody always asks what the hardest thing about Starcloud is, and it’s the thermal system, these radiators in particular. Bailey was responsible for designing and fabricating the radiators, and Bailey is also responsible for the satellite being here. In the end, we only had 3 weeks to do the final assembly of the satellite, and Bailey went down and basically built that bus from scratch. Molly O'Shea Damn. Bailey Montaño It was fun. Molly O'Shea Where’d you build it? Bailey Montaño In Colorado, in our bus provider’s office. Molly O'Shea Oh my God. All right, so we’re just leaving— Philip Johnston So, yeah. Molly O'Shea —the main facility. We’re now going over here. Philip Johnston Yeah. We’re going to— Molly O'Shea You’re buying up the entire— ### Scaling Starcloud’s Manufacturing Philip Johnston 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. Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston We’ve got this middle section, which will come online in November, and then we have access to the third one in February next year. Molly O'Shea Mm-hmm. Philip Johnston This enables us to scale manufacturing for Starcloud 3. One of the reasons we need so much space is that Starcloud 3 has 100-meter—well, 400-foot—deployables 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. Molly O'Shea I just think Brad’s going to trip. I’m so sorry. Philip Johnston It’s fine. It’s fine. Molly O'Shea To manufacture 88,000, okay? Philip Johnston Yeah, yeah, yeah. Molly O'Shea Yeah. Philip Johnston To manufacture 88,000, we’re going to need a whole bunch more space. Molly O'Shea So how many do you think you’ll be able to produce a day? Philip Johnston 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 a year. This is one of the 3 spaces, and we’ve got about 100,000 square feet that we can fit out for manufacturing. We’re going to remove this wall, and we’ll remove that wall— Molly O'Shea This is huge. Oh my God. Philip Johnston Yeah. It’s going to be quite a sight to behold when this is up and running. Molly O'Shea You should throw a Halloween party in here with these— Philip Johnston Oh, yeah. We’re going to do an opening party sometime soon, so you’re very much welcome. Molly O'Shea Thank you. Philip Johnston But I know you’re on the road all the time. Molly O'Shea You never know where I land. Philip Johnston Who knows? Maybe Woodinville in 3 weeks. Molly O'Shea I know. Okay. So in here, it’s going to look much different than the previous facility? Philip Johnston It would look pretty similar, actually, to the previous facility. Molly O'Shea It looks the same? Philip Johnston Except with a manufacturing line, like a proper— Molly O'Shea Right. Philip Johnston —in the end state, we want it to be like an auto manufacturing line. If you see a Tesla factory, you see cars going down a line. It’ll be exactly like that, except with Starcloud 3 chassis going down the line, with various things being added. Molly O'Shea How does Starcloud 3 get to Starship? Philip Johnston We load them on the back of a truck and then drive them down the motorway. Molly O'Shea That’s it? Philip Johnston That’s it, yeah. Molly O'Shea Oh. Philip Johnston It’s very similar to the way they do it at the full Starlink facility, just down the road from here. They literally load all those on the back of a truck and drive them across the country to Florida. Molly O'Shea Damn. Philip Johnston Yeah. Molly O'Shea 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? Philip Johnston Yeah. Right now, launch is very constrained, especially from 2028 and 2029 onwards. A portion of that cash is going to reserving launch slots. A bunch of it is going to fitting out these places, and then hiring and materials and everything else. We’re making about a million dollars a month in interest right now. Molly O'Shea Oh my God. Philip Johnston But soon— Molly O'Shea Do you use Brex? Philip Johnston We do use Brex, actually. —we’ll be spending. ### Securing Satellites in Orbit Molly O'Shea So one major 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 one down, or our adversaries get in contact with it, or maybe there’s a listening device. Apparently, there was one at OpenAI. How do you think through the national security concerns when it comes to chips and data centers in space? Philip Johnston Yeah, 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. The reason is that satellites are traveling at about 17,000 miles an hour, so targeting and having some kind of kinetic impact on a satellite at that speed is very difficult. We have a pretty good case study from the Starlink satellites. Starlink is being used in Ukraine, and also Starshield, and the Russians aren’t particularly happy about that. In terms of both cyber and the physical security of satellites, we can see the tactics people are already using on Starlink. We’re using the same kind of cryptography to make sure the satellites are secure from that perspective. Anything that approaches a satellite would be very visible. Anything bigger than a one-inch cube could be tracked in space, so we would see if somebody was tampering with our satellites, and it would be considered an act of war. There’s the Outer Space Treaty, which governs what you can and can’t do, and that would be considered an act of war on the U.S. That’s the purpose—the primary purpose—of Space Force. One of the key purposes is to develop interceptors and things to dissuade offensive action. Molly O'Shea 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? Philip Johnston Definitely the thing I’m most looking forward to is the launch of Starcloud 2. 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. Molly O'Shea Exciting. Well, thank you so much, Philip. Philip Johnston Thanks so much for coming.