Starpath may build its own launch company

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:23

   our solution to this problem is it's very simple and this will be my first time saying this on record which is that we have a date in the back of our heads where if the launch market doesn't fix itself um we are going to go build a launch company and um the reason that we have to do it is because we want our customers to be successful. So for those who are listening who haven't had, who don't know about us, we supply mass-produced components, including the world's lightest space solar panel to companies building satellites, including those building AI data centers in space.

2. 15:55

   And because we want our customers to be successful and because they have no way of... successful in the present world, there's a date in the back of our head and there is a clock that is ticking towards that date. And if something doesn't change, like SpaceX entering the market or multiple players competitively bidding large volume launch contracts and offering reasonable prices like $200, $300, or heck, $500 a kilogram, we will go build a launch company and sell that product. And the reason is for the betterment of the world, because we think superintelligence is something that everybody should have not just a couple of companies when you're thinking through the decision to like this business alone is hard enough like it's very very difficult to build one space company um how did you kind of math the logic in your head for even thinking about doing

3. 16:49

   a launch company as well so first of all uh i don't want to understate the difficulty um like there's a phrase it's not rocket science and that phrase exists for a reason because rocket science well rocket science isn't actually that hard but rocket engineering and manufacturing is extremely challenging i would say it's like it's less math and more logic i mean you said how did you math the logic there wasn't a lot of math there was mostly logic i mean a little bit of math like okay what would rocket look like how big would it be where would you launch it from uh these types of questions but it's mostly logic like the logic is like okay super intelligence is being made um So you could make a bet that it doesn't need to scale, in which case we have no problems, right? We don't need to scale. The ground is sufficient. Deploy all your data centers on the ground, every sappy. Okay, that would be one bet. That doesn't really seem very likely.

4. 17:41

   um in the more likely case where we do need to scale uh the ground doesn't work space becomes better um and then if you just go through the logic of what happens in that scenario which seems to me like the likely scenario um it's quite grim it's like um you have this like sort of standoffish market with like massive companies and i'm not against big companies okay i'm not socialist but i am against like um futures where technologies are don't are like important technologies aren't competed right like like uh i mean you could get a little political and make some comments about like medicare and stuff like i don't need to like if super intelligence is good enough to do most people's jobs and you know society looks like a society that's like supported by ubi like do you want that super intelligence to be owned by one company that is like effectively

5. 18:28

   the government like i'm not saying that will happen or that that's anybody's intention i'm saying i don't think we want that um and uh i looked around i asked every launch company how much launch they would sell me and for how much discovered that the market is completely fucked and um wanted to do something about it and and it's not like i have um i'm just uh sounding the alarm that it's a problem there's this uh funny line everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face and i got to imagine that the ai data center punch is effectively both like a great blessing and a great curse which is there's like infinite demand in space for solar panels and ironically you will not be able to put any of your solar panels up in space um so how did you kind of go through the period where you realized this was kind of a fact and how did you kind of

6. 19:21

   changed direction in that period um well i mean i basically told you everything that like i basically stepped through a hundred percent of the logic already um and uh the more graphic answer is um a friend of mine who probably will know i'm referring to him but i can't name him by name asked me some questions but that led me to reconsider my opinion okay so so just for some context three months ago i didn't think this was a problem i was like yeah of course starship is the best rocket ever made um it's so amazing like it's going to create infinite supply and i still believe i literally still believe that um that Starship is the best rocket ever made and that it will create pseudo infinite supply of launch services. SpaceX has proven themselves as a ruthlessly competent executor. So three months

7. 20:12

   ago, I thought, fine, you need to build for the biggest possible scale, which is what we're doing here, which we haven't stopped, by the way. It's not like we changed our plans. And we need to build for that big scale because superintelligence is coming. That's going to drive insane demand. and you need to be able to service it. And my friend asked me a few questions that led me to reconsider this belief, led me to consider for the first time, hey, what if actually the incentives work out such that despite having pseudo-infinite supply, none is available?

8. 20:45

   Okay, what a concept, right? It's like imagine like a banana plantation, but you're starving, it's confusing. And I stepped through the logic and I was like, you know it might actually be the case that we are starving on a banana plantation um and then I asked the banana plantation owners so to speak okay the companies the rocket companies um you know what they would sell me and at what price and discovered that in fact we will soon be starving on the banana plantation proverbially um and so graphically what happened is took a deep breath