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SpaceX has no competition — Saurav Shroff, Starpath
Saurav Shroff argues that launch competition is essential to make space-based AI compute accessible, and says Starpath may build a launch company if supply stays closed.
Relentless · Ti Morse
- Saurav Shroff is founder and CEO of Starpath.
The best minutes
- 8:56AI data satellites need cheaper launch and much greater scale6 min
- 21:23Starpath rebuilt space solar panels from a clean sheet8 min
- 30:36Starpath builds factory capacity ahead of customer demand6 min
Also worth watching
- 0:05A launch monopoly has little incentive to sell capacity7 min
- 15:18Starpath may build its own launch company6 min
- 48:39AI revenue can make rocket development economically rational5 min
- 53:56Mars may need far fewer flights than AI data satellites4 min
- 39:55Starpath is filling supply gaps for AI satellites6 min
Skip the Austin factory-scale-up and sleeping-at-the-factory discussion, plus the moon-tourism price estimates.
Full analysis · 6 min read
Real Alpha · Nov 7
Saurav Shroff says Falcon 9 misses AI's cost target fivefold
- Shroff estimates Falcon 9 costs SpaceX about $1,000 per kilogram against a roughly $200 target.
- He puts the cost gap at fivefold and the scale shortfall at tenfold, with launch access still unresolved.
- Founders should separate factory forecasts from orders and verify launch offers.
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Read the rest of the analysis
6 sections, the 5 other voices it tests Shroff against, and what it means for you. Every episode we cut gets one.
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Falcon 9 misses the stated AI-satellite hurdle
Shroff's hurdle is a roughly $5-per-watt AI satellite, with launch near $1 per watt. In his example, a 200-kilowatt unit should cost about $1 million all-in, including roughly $200,000 for launch.
He assumes a one-ton satellite, which he calls very optimistic, producing an implied launch target near $200 per kilogram. Shroff said Falcon 9 sold for single-digit thousands per kilogram, while costing SpaceX something like $1,000.
That roughly $1,000 cost is five times the target. The selling price was higher still. Shroff agreed when the host said Falcon 9 was about five times off.
Scale compounds it. He says Falcon 9 carries about ten tons to sun-synchronous orbit, enough for two megawatts in his example. A two-gigawatt constellation would therefore need 1,000 flights, by his arithmetic.
For example, Philip Johnston of Starcloud told Sourcery in October 2026 that launch cost sets orbital compute's threshold. His estimate gives a threshold below $500 per kilogram, not Shroff's roughly $200 target.
“Falcon 9 is 10x short on scale and 5x short on cost”
Our read
These calculations define the launch requirement, not a price buyers can secure today. Until a provider offers repeatable flights near the implied level, orbital compute remains an unclosed cost case.
Launch access may stay closed even when rockets work
Shroff's sharper warning is commercial access, not a rocket specification. He said SpaceX would not sell traditional launch for either telecommunications or AI data satellites.
Some aspiring providers, he said, had no rocket; others were aiming to match Falcon 9, not Starship. His argument turns on incentives, not just whether rockets can reach orbit.
A company that can deploy its own compute may keep a scarce rocket for itself, especially when AI capacity carries high margins. Then more rockets may not create launch supply for independent satellite builders.
Two outside sellers would alter that game, in his view. Gwynne Shotwell said on All-In in September 2026 that SpaceX won early customers amid high prices and poor service.
That history shows challengers can enter a bad launch market. Yet it does not prove a supplier can meet Shroff's reusable, cheaper, higher-cadence requirement.
Our read
The bottleneck is commercial as well as technical. A successful reusable rocket matters only if someone sells capacity outside its own constellation.
Shroff may build a launch company if supply stays closed
Shroff says Starpath has an internal deadline to build a launch company if the market stays closed. He did not name its date.
He offered examples of reasonable high-volume prices, like $200, $300 or even $500 per kilogram. These are illustrations, not a formal price band or signed launch offer.
Rocket engineering and manufacturing are extremely challenging, Shroff said. His own trigger followed questions from a friend and inquiries to launch providers.
Baiju Bhatt proposed smaller rockets on repeatable trajectories and parallel launch mounts on The Shawn Ryan Show in October 2026. He estimated about $1 billion per site and 660 megawatts of compute annually.
That is a contrasting infrastructure design, not a quote for Starpath's needs. It still shows why cadence and site-level throughput belong beside cost in a launch comparison.
Our read
Bhatt offers a concrete alternative, but no evidence here shows Starpath can buy its capacity. Until a design, schedule and price exist, building a launcher remains a contingency.
Starpath rebuilt its panel around lower costs
The host asked if Starpath had cut panel cost by 50 times. Shroff agreed, then explained the redesign from first principles.
Shroff said legacy panels used rare-earth materials and low-volume wafer processes, sometimes costing hundreds of dollars per watt. He said Starpath started with common materials and processes inspired by OLED manufacturing.
He said Starpath lists its panel at $15 per watt. At high volume, he said, the selling price is roughly an order of magnitude lower.
The panel's projected mass advantage also matters. Shroff estimated a 200-kilowatt satellite could weigh about one-third as much with it.
For example, the OLED analogy explains the manufacturing inspiration, not orbital efficiency, lifetime or yield. The episode provides no test results for those measures.
Still, a lighter panel helps only if launch access and total system economics also work.
Our read
The panel could lower both production cost and mass, reinforcing the launch case. But the episode offers a design rationale and estimates, not operating evidence.
Capacity reassures customers but raises capital risk
Starpath plans a 130,000-square-foot Los Angeles fab producing 50 million watts yearly, Shroff said. He expected the line in about five months.
The host described current space-panel demand as roughly five megawatts. Shroff clarified that all launched satellites together total something like 50 megawatts, or roughly five excluding Starlink.
That figure describes the wattage of satellites launched, not a clean annual-orders measure. Shroff says customers mostly ask how much capacity Starpath will have in later years.
He said customers ask how fast Starpath can reach 75 gigawatts yearly. That target is 1,500 times the planned fab's 50 megawatts, by division.
Shroff said Starpath has orders and down payments for its panel. He did not quantify how much planned capacity those cover.
Philip Johnston of Starcloud told Sourcery in October 2026 that three buildings total about 100,000 square feet. He said the facilities could support 100 satellites a week.
That is a different capacity unit, not validation of Starpath's wattage forecast. Gavin Ezekowitz said on How I Invest in October 2026 he saw data-center construction ahead of a compute shortage.
That supports advance investment generally, not Starpath's conversion of requests into orders. Still, building ahead can secure capacity before a buyer commits, but exposes Starpath to idle equipment and cash costs.
Philip Johnston · Sourcery · Oct 31Starcloud plans to build toward 100 satellites a week- GEGavin Ezekowitz · How I Invest · Oct 28SpaceX's compute buildout shows the value of anticipating shortages
Our read
The business logic is coherent if customer schedules and future demand are real. Its weakest disclosed point is the bridge from large capacity questions to committed volume.
Shroff says AI demand could justify rocket investment
Shroff's economic case compares a $5 billion rocket with two weeks of Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate. He uses that ratio to say major rocket investment can be economically rational.
But annualized revenue is not cash available for development. The episode supplies no cash-generation, financing, development-timing or operating-cost model to bridge the comparison.
Steve Eisman questioned the meaning of AI firms' annualized revenue figures on The Real Eisman Playbook in October 2026. He also highlighted CoreWeave's debt and lease obligations, separating run-rate revenue from funding capacity.
Shroff says AI spending could support reusable rockets, then make lunar tourism and Mars more accessible. His rough comparison is about 1,000 Starships for a Mars base versus 100,000 flights for an AI-satellite constellation.
He says ten Starships on Mars could make a small city, while ten in orbit would barely register for compute. That is his measure of impact per flight, not a schedule or forecast.
Our read
AI demand could make rocket capability economically easier to justify, in Shroff's view. But that upside still depends on access for customers, which his account says is unresolved.
What it means for you
- Launch price offers. Ask providers for a delivered price per kilogram and a launch cadence. Compare actual offers with Shroff's roughly $200 target and his illustrative $200, $300 or even $500 prices.
- Orders versus forecasts. Separate signed orders and deposits from requests for future capacity. Calculate what share of planned output those commitments cover.
- Factory readiness. Track equipment installation, yield and shipped watts against the 50-megawatt annual plan and the March 1, 2027 line target.
- Revenue quality. Model rocket development against cash generation, financing, timing and operating costs, not just two weeks of annualized revenue.
What to watch
- Whether another provider sells high-volume, fully reusable launch and discloses its price per kilogram.
- Whether Starpath's first production line is ready by March 1, 2027.
- Whether customer capacity requests turn into signed orders and deposits.
Send this to launch and manufacturing leaders budgeting orbital infrastructure.
Watch the roughly six-minute segment where Shroff gives the launch cost and scale gap.
Written by Real Alpha from the episode's transcript and the other moments it links, then checked against the transcript. Quotes are the speaker's exact words.
Minute by minute
- 0:05Launch supply remains scarce
Shroff says SpaceX is the only launch company currently serving the market at meaningful scale, with Falcon 9 supporting Starlink and Starship aimed at future spacecraft. He says other providers are still catching up to Falcon 9 or lack a rocket, leaving launch services unavailable to many customers.
- 4:50Shroff sees little incentive to sell
Shroff argues SpaceX has little economic reason to sell launch if it can use Starship to deploy its own AI satellites, given his view that demand for superintelligence will exceed supply. He sees two possible outcomes: new launch competition, or one company controlling superintelligence capacity without pressure to lower prices or improve quality.
- 6:58AI satellites will reshape launch demand
Shroff divides the market into a near-term phase, through roughly 2029 or 2030, when telecommunications satellites remain dominant, and a later phase when AI satellites dominate by size or power. He says Starpath can use Falcon 9 and other providers catching up to it in the near term, but sees the later phase as more uncertain.
- 8:56AI satellites require cheaper launch
Shroff describes an AI data satellite as a simple powered shell carrying compute, memory, solar panels, networking and control systems. To compete with ground data centers, he says it must cost about $5 per watt all-in, with roughly $1 per watt for launch; his 200-kilowatt example totals $1 million. He estimates Falcon 9 is 5x short on cost and 10x short on scale.
- 13:00Reusable rockets face a selling dilemma
Shroff says AI-satellite launch requires reusable first and second stages because expendable upper stages limit cost and flight rate. He identifies SpaceX and Stoke Space as the only two companies he sees seriously developing fully reusable, two-stage orbital rockets, but argues neither has an incentive to sell launch if it can deploy its own AI satellites.
- 15:18Starpath may build a launch company
Shroff says that if launch access does not improve—through SpaceX entering the market or multiple providers bidding on large contracts at roughly $200, $300 or $500 per kilogram—Starpath may build a launch company. He says the goal would be to help customers deploy space-based compute rather than leave superintelligence capacity with a few firms.
- 18:47Shroff revises his launch assumptions
Shroff says he had assumed three months earlier that Starship would create near-infinite launch supply. A friend's questions led him to examine provider incentives; after asking rocket companies what they would sell and at what price, he concluded that supply could exist yet remain unavailable, and began sketching a rocket.
- 21:23Starpath rebuilds space solar
Shroff says Starpath rebuilt its space solar panel from first principles rather than trying to cheapen legacy designs, which relied on rare materials and could cost $300 per watt, perhaps as much as $1,000. He describes Starpath's product as an ultra-thin, OLED-like panel made from common materials and affirms the host's claim that its cost is down 50 times.
- 30:36Factory capacity leads current demand
Shroff says Starpath's 130,000-square-foot LA factory is expected to become a 50-megawatt-per-year production line in about five months. He says the total power of launched satellites is around 50 megawatts including Starlink and around 5 megawatts without it, while demand forecasts from companies that spend billions on data centers justify building ahead.
- 36:19Customers want capacity ahead of need
Shroff says Starpath's next planned factory, Starpath Austin Giga, is designed for 1.2 gigawatts. He says customers want to see future capacity before they need it, and expects factory builds to remain difficult: hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment must work reliably.
- 39:55Starpath plans to supply more parts
Shroff says roughly half the factory will make solar modules and half will make other, not-yet-public satellite products. He says existing suppliers may not be ready to deliver components such as thrusters at the low costs and high volumes AI satellite constellations require, so Starpath plans to expand beyond panels to help customers deliver.
- 46:56Tourism could help seed a moon base
Shroff sees lunar tourism as an early source of demand, estimating that at $10 million per trip at least 100 people might pay, and at $1 million per trip thousands could. He says a long-term price could settle around half a million dollars per trip, potentially enough to support a base.
- 48:39AI demand could finance space infrastructure
Shroff says AI compute demand could drive rapid rocket development, much as passenger and cargo demand drove aviation. He argues that the side benefits could be greater in space: a mature launch and satellite supply chain could lower the cost of lunar and Martian projects, while AI firms could justify rocket development through compute revenue.
- 53:56AI infrastructure could lower Mars costs
Shroff contrasts the scale of the two efforts: he says an AI satellite constellation could require 100,000 Starship flights, while 10 Starships sent to Mars could have a profound historical impact. He argues AI demand could pay for rockets and build a mature supply chain, lowering the cost of a Mars city, though operations would still have to be paid for.
Published Oct 28, 2026.
Transcript · 46 min read
Relentless, hosted by Ti Morse, with Saurav Shroff.
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
Today, I'm sitting down with Saurav Shroff, the founder and CEO of StarPath. StarPath is going to be putting a lot of solar panels in space in a few short years here.
“Any rational economist would say that it's dumb to sell launch services, the bottleneck, to anybody else.”
If you had to think through your own business, if your entire business relies on the ability to launch your product to orbit hopefully in a few years right um how do you think through like basically solving that problem or working with one of the other providers so it kind of makes sense where you can scale at a reasonable rate i guess it's best to answer your question by breaking up the future into two relatively distinct time periods we're gonna call the first time period which is in the immediate future the period where ai data sets are not the majority and then we're going to call and we i think that's like roughly now till like 2029 or something or 2030 then we're going to call the period after that the period where ai sats are the majority and when i say the majority i mean the majority of satellites sent to space measured by their size or power okay the aggregate size of power of all the satellites during the first phase our business really has no problems as in SpaceX, before exiting the launch market, which they recently did, sold lots of launch using their current rocket, Falcon 9, to many companies, most of whom are our customers.
Read the whole transcript
And there are other rocket launch companies who will be moderately successful in catching up to Falcon 9's capability, which is to say 10 to 100, well, I guess Falcon's higher than 100, but 10 to 100 flights a year, 10 tons per launch, and the economics of a rocket that is not fully reusable. and all of those things will be true over the next two to three years and during that period of time our products will continue to sell and continue to provide immense value to customers so we're not worried about this phase phase one phase two is where there's some reason to be concerned let's look at what an ai data set is why it's better than a terrestrial data center aka a data center on the ground and then what's required to make it good on the rocket side so ai data
“So Falcon 9 is 10x short on scale and 5x short on cost.”
So really you just need two companies that are selling launch.
And for a long time, we thought the launch market is gonna be solved because SpaceX sells launch. So it just takes one other person or company to come along and also sell launch. So if you sold launch, we'd be in good shape. But we went from one hoping for two down to zero hoping for one but when we're at zero nobody wants to be the first um and so uh
“the reason that we have to do it is because we want our customers to be successful.”
opened a spreadsheet and started designing a rocket you've been able to drop the cost of a
“So, the solar panel is really like a cheaper and light-absorbing optimized version of an OLED display.”
electricity so i guess this may be a slightly crazy question but how does the thickness of
solar panel because most solar panels that i've seen are incredibly thick like an inch yeah why does this work if i told you everything about how it works um i wouldn't be doing my job very well so i can't um i will correct one thing about what you said which is that um a the average solar panel on the ground looks like it's an inch thick from the outside because it's got this thick aluminum frame around it but if you took the aluminum frame off it would only be a few millimeters thick um so we're talking about this solar panel being like the thinness of a piece of paper and the average space solar panel being the thinness of like 10 or 20 or maybe 30 pieces of paper.
So like a small stack, you know, not even the height of a pad of sticky notes, okay? Like thinner than that. So it's not like we're talking about like an inch to a paper. We're talking about like a small stack of paper to a piece of paper, which at the scale of an AI data set really, really matters. Like it is, I mean, it is probably the case that a satellite with this product at a 200 kilowatt class scale will be like one third of the weight. than a satellite without it, and oh, by the way, way cheaper. Right now, we're sitting in a massive new warehouse that's like 130,000 square feet
“the questions that our customers are asking us do include those first few things quality weight cost but mostly include how much capacity do you have in year X”
I would say, well, what about the cost of losing? So if you think through basically what your biggest bottlenecks are, you get the lease here, you start filling it out with a bunch of different machines. You have the lineup in, I don't know, six, eight months. March 1st, 2027. great uh so it's about six months what does the scaling process look like from going from one factory with 130 000 square feet and like 50 megawatt production annual output to like a gigawatt um so incidentally 1.2 gigawatts is the size of our next fab which is called starpath austin giga um austin why did you choose like that amount versus a smaller amount like what what's the logic um and we need to climb the orders of magnitude and so um you choose a smaller amount but uh it's the same answer as before which is like in 2027 the things that customers are going to want to see is capacity um more so than what they need and then because the next year they're going to need it right and then in 2028 uh or whatever the year after the things that customers are going to want
to see is capacity more so than what they need because they're going to need it the year after and then in 2029 what are they going to want to see capacity capacity exactly right um customers want to see capacity because they have huge plans and those plans if not done block billions if not tens of billions in revenue for them and that's proven they know that so what they want to see is capacity in simple english they're not fucking around the customers want to see capacity so why one gigawatt um it's just like roughly an order of magnitude higher than this facility this facility yes is technically 50 megawatts so it's 20 times as opposed to 10 times roughly it's an order of magnitude higher what do you expect to get easier as you scale from like a factory that roughly what is that 24 times the size of this one um no uh i don't expect anything well yeah i mean i think some things will be easier like you know we will know tons of things going into austin giga that we knew nothing about going into uh this building this is our this is our first rodeo um but you know like i don't think that there's anything easy about building a fab um and i think if somebody does think that i would say where's your fab um so i don't think it's going to be easy it's hundreds and hundreds of
millions of dollars of equipment almost all of it needs to work almost all of the time it's not quite all but like 90 of it needs to work 90 of the time there's nothing easy about that and it's hard for me to foresee what the challenges are but they'll be immense and with each fab i will move into the corner of the building so at this building we're just in the middle of buying an airstream airstream will be installed in that corner over there and i will sleep in the airstream until the fab is producing product that ships to our customers um and then when we go build austin giga likely the same or maybe a different airstream to be honest i haven't thought about it um will be used for the same purpose um in a similar position the corner why is it important to sleep at the factory if you're sleeping in the factory and you know there's not too much sound deadening and you can hear machines and forklifts then okay actually that specifically that might be a little annoying but um it'll be hard to take your mind off of it um which is exactly what i want one of the things that you mentioned earlier today when we were basically walking around and you were just like telling me the layout and showing me the layout of everything
is you want roughly half the factory to be producing solar panels and you want
“And if you approach a satellite components vendor and say, hey, I want to buy 100,000 thrusters, I'll give you 100 million up front”
as a rocket it's like all like all of our motivations come from you know the feeling that number one we need to earn our customers business by providing them with a great product and number two once we've earned their business we need to make sure that they're successful in every way that we can and part of that is the most obvious thing just delivering on time a good quality product which we're very quite anal about and then the second thing is looking around and wondering you know what else can i do for you um so it's like a hospitality mindset almost which is like i know like almost sounds dumb it's like what do you mean it's business isn't it supposed to be like super cut and dry but it's like not for me not really it's very it's a from a hot it feels like feels the same as the reason why like you know to offer to make you tea after dinner it's like oh what else can i do for you um and uh you know the first thing i can do for you is is give you great solar panel and then if i if i notice that i think there's something well it's not very good at cooking okay um the first thing i can i can do
for you is give you a great solar panel and then if i notice that there's something else that i need to do for you my thought process is well what else can i do for you and um that's the impetus between behind a lot of these products um now past the hospitality phase and in the execution phase it's very different the mindset is more like okay we've decided to do this thing what's a schedule and let's get the damn thing done um and so it's not it's not a very hospitality like mindset when we're executing but when we're thinking about what to do it totally is i know that the biggest push for building moon base is going to i think be the mass driver on the moon which is just basically pumping out am i completely off on that um i think you could totally be right it's it's not something that strikes me as like completely obvious like the most obvious like first valuable thing that the moon is able to drive i would say it's probably not the first valuable thing i would say it's probably the first very valuable thing right the first valuable thing on the moon is a product you could call novelty so like if you can bring humans there you will certainly find a lot of humans that are willing to pay to go you know if it's safe i mean obviously
if it's safe and if the price is reasonable like probably in the 10 million dollars per trip price you'll probably find like at least 100 people who want to go um and probably in the 1 million dollars per trip price you'll probably found find you know thousands of people who want to go and then if you can get the price to 100k, which is like, it's kind of pushing it in terms of like, what's physically possible. Like, I mean, if you just assume the Starship is perfectly free, SpaceX sells at no margin, it only costs fuel, even then it'll cost around 100k. And there's no demand pricing of people can, you know, only a small number of people can go.
Yeah, I'd say the price probably lands in like sort of half million dollar range in the long term. And at that price, there is certainly like a pretty high amount of demand, like enough demand to create a base, enough demand to fund a lot of flights. It will not look like United Airlines, but it will look like probably how United Airlines looked when airplanes were brand new.
“the value of a rocket is two weeks of Anthropik's annualized revenue run rate.”
they have to do is pay the operating expensive um so there actually may be some airline analogies here that make sense but i'm not really one for analogies like this is the second most exciting thing to me about super intelligence which is that like it will almost certainly be true that we will build a city on mars after you make um you know the terawatt or even even a two gigawatt
“if I put 10 starships on Mars, then that will have a profoundly large impact on, like a categorical impact on history.”
