Nvidia GPUs in Orbit: Inside Starcloud’s $2B Factory

awesome cool cool this is the main assembly area for star cloud 2 and this is a satellite in the background you can see star cloud 2 you can see on the top the two lasers and then we have some deployables it's about 120 foot wingspan deployment and we actually just put this through vibration

went from founding to in orbit in 21 months. Yeah, which is a record. I think the fastest anybody did that before us was four years. And that was basically because Adi and Ezra built satellite by hand um yeah we'll speak with that in a minute but oh my god and so i know this is something that might surprise people it definitely surprised me because now i'm doing more of these tours and the locations like it's not el secundo it's not down in long beach but you guys are up here in the seattle region so why seattle yeah so people know people don't realize this but um 90 percent of all satellites launched in the last few years uh by mass were designed built and tested in redmond washington which is uh exactly where we are now so um it's if you run we were literally me and ezra were sitting in el segundo for the first month of the company and we were typing into linkedin like okay spacecraft thermal engineer and it was literally

like Redmond, Redmond, Redmond, Bellevue, Seattle, Redmond, Redmond, and we were like, okay, shit, I guess we have to move up. And yeah, so about half our team actually formerly worked at SpaceX. The other half were the hyperscalers, so we have AWS and Azure down the road. So for doing data centers in space, this is literally the best place in the world you could be. Okay, so we're also joined by another co-founder of StarCloud, Addy. So Addy, tell us a little bit about your background and how did you end up here? Yeah. Before StarCloud, I was at SpaceX for about two years. I was a responsible engineer for a feature called Tracking Beams, which essentially gives Starlink to all the in-motion vehicles, including aviation, cruise ships, and even the Starships. So if you've ever seen those cool Starship videos, I have built that. Before SpaceX, I was at Microsoft for about two decades, And in the last couple of years or so, I was working on a GPU, large-scale GPU deployments in production. We onboarded the very first large package models before they were called LLMs in a bunch of data centers and working very closely with NVIDIA on that.

And it was really rewarding to be part of two keynotes in GDC, one in 2019, where Jensen talked about conversational AI, that was what it was called back then, and our demo was part of that keynote. And then later this year, part of the same GTC keynote in San Jose, Jensen introduced Space One, which is the very first GPU designed to work in space. Damn. Yeah, Philip was telling me you've been mentioned in GTC talks multiple times. Not me personally, but our team, yes. That's incredible. I helped build a demo. Yeah. So we're standing in front of StarCloud too. Do you want to give us a little rundown on it?

Yeah. So people are busy at the moment. They are about to fire the HDRM, which is essentially a latch that will deploy the solar panels on each side of the spacecraft. And if you hear a loud pop, that's it. So we are testing the satellites actively. we are testing very systems. There you go. I was like, something's gonna explode in here. Maybe not as climactic as wanted, but this is actually the most important deployment event that happens in orbit. We use that to kick off the deployment of both solid panels in orbit and make sure we can get kilowatts of power to allow our compute. So, I know this is a very new facility, but where does that get made?

Like, where are all these components coming from? Is it vertically integrated? How do you think about engineering? We try to vertically integrate as much as possible. Obviously, we are not manufacturing NVIDIA ports or other high-level compute systems, but we integrated everything here and we manufactured our radiators, we put together the solar panels, so a lot of the cooling system is being built internally here, which is kind of our secret sauce, if you will, another HDRM filing. And yeah, we try to integrate as much as possible in-house. What's been the biggest technical challenge coming over to StarCloud? I think the cooling system and the radiaters are by far the largest technical challenge and I think we are very proud of what we did and how it works and how compact the whole thing is. It's mostly a focus on engineering costs rather than is this possible or not. We know it's possible but the question is how do you make it super cheap and how you make it manufacturable at scale yeah i mean that's a big point i was interviewing sean mcguire and he was talking about data centers in space and he was like I did the math on it and it makes sense the math maths and so a large component of that is energy transfer and like how much energy

is used on earth for earth data centers versus in space and so in space um this is going to be a little bit of a different environment it is very very cold but you still need radiators you need cooling all that kind of stuff so could you explain that out a little bit more well uh it's Basically, the engineering math is hard, but economic math is the one that truly matters in orbit. So what you want to dissipate every single watt you're receiving from the sun. So that is the hard part, how you make it very efficiently, how do you essentially emulate a cooling system that mimics the one in data centers today on Earth.

As probably people know, 2025 was the year of liquid cooling in all the data centers so people have to switch to liquid cooling because that's the only way to achieve the incredible densities of compute in the next range of data centers and we are capitalizing on that and using the same thing the same technology in space as well for those who don't know about the fermi explorer mission can you explain that and why it's significant for you yeah so my co-founder Zadie Ezra and I have created a non-profit with a few others Kamgrafaran and others. We created a non-profit to send the first spacecraft to the nearest star.

So the nearest star system to us is Alpha Centauri, it's about four light years away, and we realized after doing Starcloud One that you can do things very cheaply. Like for example, Starcloud One, we had a quote from one of the primes, they told us it would cost 75 million to 100 million dollars to do Starcloud One. We did it for about two and a half million dollars. No way. So we realized you can do things very cheaply and we found- You can just put things in space. Yeah, pretty much. And we found a trajectory. We had a physical AI lab out of MIT run this analysis and find a trajectory that allows us to get a spacecraft on a trajectory to Alpha Centauri for about $10 to $15 million.

So it won't use any technology that doesn't exist today. It's going to use Hall Effect iron thrusters with solar to power it. And we're going to basically spiral in towards the sun for five years. And then we're going to fire the thruster at the perihelion at the closest point to the sun for another five years to create these ever-expanding ellipses. And then on the last firing, we're just going to fling off in the direction. It's actually not even anywhere close to where Alpha Centauri is today. Alpha Centauri is moving towards us and it will intersect on a path in about 80,000 years. So the hope is that we'll be both the first to leave on this journey to another star and also the last to arrive.

So hopefully in 50 years or 100 years there'll be better propulsion technology, in a thousand years there'll be much better propulsion technology. So I hope stuff starts flying past us. And then by the time we arrive in 80,000 years, maybe for 15,000 years there's already been a colony. even if your propulsion technology was only 20 percent faster. And so what I hope happens is they sort of applaud our spacecraft across the finish line, they capture it and they put it in a museum or something, and then from there it'll take sort of five to ten million years to settle the galaxy, even with just today's technology. And then from there it's about a billion years to get to Andromeda, our nearest galaxy, and then from there to get to the local group of 50 galaxies is about another sort of five billion years. And the purpose for me of doing it is like either all that happens or it doesn't for some reason and like yeah there's this idea of the the fermi paradox the idea the question of why we don't see more intelligence in our galaxy or more obvious evidence of it and aliens yeah why our solar system isn't part of a galactic empire you know yeah if they it's pretty quick like 10 million years to settle the galaxy is the blink of an

eye in galactic time frames so if there had been intelligent life on any other star trillion Brilliant planets in our galaxy, if there'd been an intelligent life on any other one in the last 10 billion years, galaxies been around for more than 10 billion years, then it would have been 5 million years to settle the whole galaxy. So it's really kind of concerning that we don't see more evidence to that. To me, there's two options. Either we're exceptionally rare, maybe we're the first species or intelligence to get to this level of complexity in the whole galaxy, or maybe even in the local 50 cluster of galaxies.

or and and by the way i'm open to that i like that idea like maybe we're going to be the first to settle the galaxy and that's a great privilege or the other alternative is intelligent life doesn't last very long maybe there's been intelligent life on many other stars in our galaxy and for some reason it doesn't survive very long um so either way i think we should like know about that and one of the reasons to do this mission is to make people think more about our place in in the galaxy and more about the fermi paradox and how did you get into space and how did you get interested in this so i mean i've always been interested in space like i wanted to be an astronaut as a kid like anybody why like what exposed you to that you just um i guess like yeah sci-fi movies when i was a kid like i read the asimov novels um foundation series um yeah it was there was this there's this uh phrase that people sometimes say which is like we're too late to explore the earth and we're too early to explore the solar system in the galaxy and I always thought that was really sad like it was exciting to me to be an explorer and the the you know the the voyages across the globe were kind of exciting to me and then realizing okay we've kind of explored everything

now everything's done was kind of sad and then yeah recently started thinking okay well maybe we can do our own like our own effort maybe we can be the first to send a spacecraft to the near a star and well like what an incredible privilege that would be um so if you wrote a sentimental note on star cloud one what are you going to put on the spacecraft i'm definitely going to put the name of my fiance on there um so for the low low price of uh oh you're going to start selling logo spots wow we got an advertising option yeah there you go people can go to familyexplorer.com donate and people can put whatever message they want on there But what would I put on there? I'm excited to put lots of information, like records of what Earth is like, and we're going to have some interest.

We'll have some scientific payloads on there, and we'll have the golden record, which is one of the artworks that they put on one of the probes going out of the solar system. But then we'll also have a solicitation period for various artistic payloads, so various artworks that people can put on there. so we're actually yeah we're drawing ideas from various places um one of them one and one cool ish scientific did you ever see this fruit fly that google or there was a startup they cut they sliced the brain yeah yeah so we'll put a digital copy of that like the of this fruit fly thing and like whoever finds this is gonna be like humans they're tiny yeah yeah yeah they'll be like how How the hell did they build this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. All right, so I do have to address this because we've done plenty of hot takes now. We did one at the New York Stock Exchange. We did one in Paris at the Raise AI Summit. So I have to ask you now, what is your hottest take? Every time I do a hot take with you, I get in trouble. Because usually, last time we did it, I said, you should buy SpaceX stock, and then Elon retweeted it. But you were right. I was totally right. I was 100% right. Okay. And then, what was my hottest take? Let's stick on the theme. So Elon posted that they're going to be worth $100 trillion in 10 years.

I think they might be worth more than $100 trillion in 10 years. You do. Yes. If all goes to plan and there's no world war, you believe SpaceX will be worth more than... $100 trillion. Correct. Okay, well, that'll be good for business. Yeah, exactly. What would make that up, though? So, like, break that down. How do you think about it? Actually, well, mostly a good chunk of it will come from the fact that Tesla's Optimus will be up and running. And so once you have Optimus is building Optimus factories, then you have this incredible exponential. And so for all of manufacturing, the rate of growth will increase a lot once Optimus is producing Optimus.

It's a bit like what's happening now with the recursive self-improvement, but for the physical world. Do you think Tesla will merge with SpaceX, which will help with that? This isn't a hot take. This is just a fact. SpaceX is going to buy Tesla, and they have to wait until the unlocks of the stock, because if they do then everyone's going to say the price wasn't fair um so at the moment uh yeah the at the moment it's that you're not going to see too many announcements but i think there's a roadster announcement tonight but beyond that i don't think you're going to see any announcements about optimus for the next year and then once they once they do the merger then we'll hear a lot more i know this will come out after the roadster announcement but what's your prediction uh what i've heard is they have these cold gas thrusters from start from one from like the spacecraft that they've so you have a compressor that's compressing air essentially and then that's being fired out the back um which means which gives you like absurd acceleration and cornering and everything else and also i think i think there's i think lift lift yeah i actually think you can get lift on these things oh my gosh what do you what do you think i just i kind of thought

it might be an eVTOL. That would be wild, but I don't think it is. You don't think it is? We would know by now if it's an eVTOL. I think you could just skip the whole car thing and just go to eVTOL, call it a roadster. That would be amazing. I like it. That would be incredible, but I would be extremely surprised if it's an eVTOL. All right, stay tuned for our predictions. Oh, my God. I don't know if this one is a little bit more than length. Length and girth. Length and girth. That's crazy. So what do you use this for what? What do you use this for? This is for screwing in bolts. That's crazy.

Where did you find this? I went to a Halloween store this morning. Oh, okay. Well, that's actually pretty impressive for a Halloween store. I can't be sword-mogged by the rest of your guests. That's wild. This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. You become what you spend on, and I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. Expense reports, receipt chasing, and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram all made the same call. they all run on brex brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards expenses and banking into a single stack with agentic finance built in ai agents that handle expenses automatically enforce policy before spend happens and close your books in minutes that's why sorcery runs on brex so i can spend time on building and not busy work it's time to get brex af learn more at brex.com slash sorcery that's b-r-e-x.com slash s-o-u-r-c-e-r-y bye from handshake to signature faster harvey the ai platform built for legal work is trusted by 80 percent of the amlaw 100 and over 20 percent of the fortune 500 learn more today at harvey.ai that's harvey.ai AI needs more than chips. It needs power, land, and

and infrastructure. Zone develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers, and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Zone is building the foundation of the AI frontier. Visit zonefrontier.com to learn more. That's zonefrontier.com to learn more. Okay, so we just finished the Vibe table. We finished looking at StarCloud 2. Now you want to go into? we'll go to the fab shop so we can see where we're welding and fabricating various aluminum and steel parts some of which for the actual spacecraft and most of which is for test equipment and other things maybe Ezra can talk a bit about the fab shop yeah this is a this is a big upgrade from our last facility so we've literally just moved in here um as of like the last few days so everything's a little bit chaotic um but um we moved from this tiny office building into into this lovely manufacturing space um and this area of it is we call the fab shop so this is where we do dirtier work um so that the cleaner work goes on in there dirtier work happens here um so we're talking um sheet metal work welding and general fabrication. So we have lots of fab shop equipment here. We have

MIG welding, TIG welding, laser welding. We have a shear for sheet metal and right here we have the manufacturing demonstrator for Starcloud 3. So Starcloud 3 is our largest platform. It's a two-ton vehicle approximately. So this is the StarCloud 3 manufacturing demonstrator. So we wanted to get some experience building a primary structure of the scale of our StarCloud 3 vehicle. So this vehicle is designed to go through the PEZ dispenser door for Starship. It's around two tons, fully loaded, 235 kilowatts, and we can deploy up to 50 of them per Starship launch. My god. I've not seen Starship or I have no idea on the scale of that but you said two of these fit in so per layer so you get two of these um wide and then wide and then 25 tall oh my god so yeah from here to the ceilings of these stacked in so right now we're in the middle of starship we're inside of it yeah that gives you an idea of the diameter of starship the fact that this can fit in there um that's it's uh it's an enormous vehicle where how have you guys been launching today what are i know you have three launches

So yeah, we're definitely rooting for them as well. All right, so now we're walking around here. you have a motorcycle we're gonna go look at that you can look at it if you want what who's is that does that go into space yeah maybe it depends how fast they go i'm like i'm permanently terrified that somebody's going to kill themselves on a mobile yeah that is a liability yeah um so this is kind of interesting this is a it's a half built um zero gravity sort of offloading rig and so we have these runners that run in two accesses and so the the deployable StarCloud 2 goes runs down this this is one half of it so yeah the other half the other half goes that side so it's like 120 foot long deployable oh my god

yeah so that small package you saw there extends down the length of this and then on one side and then down the length of that on the other side oh my god yeah Yeah. And the first few segments of that is a radiator segment. That's the radiator we've designed and fabricated in-house. As Adi was mentioning, our design is way more efficient than any other. So when we launch in January, it'll be by far the largest commercial deployable radiator in space. And the nearest comparison is the International Space Station. Our radiator is at least 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator, and about 500 times less cost per watts of dissipation than the ISS radiator. Now the ISS is an easy benchmark to meet on cost, but on mass it's quite an achievement. One of the big biggest topics,

reach outward into other parts of the economy? Yeah, so it's entirely dependent on the launch cost hitting 500 bucks a kilo. So the business as it is today runs really, you know, economically with the current launch price um in order to be competitive with terrestrial data centers on energy and infrastructure cost that's where we need the launch cost to be 500 bucks a kilo or less my expectation is that sort of we've already seen starship deploying its first payloads um 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 um and then 2028 onwards um we're hoping to see SpaceX selling capacity to commercial customers, you know, if they don't, we also are, you know, considering other options.

And so we've booked on a bunch of different other launch vehicles, not just Falcon 9, but also some others. And we'll, I think we announced Stoke already, we announced Firefly, and we'll announce some others soon. Cool, rats. Yeah. Well, if the goal on Earth is to get to a one gigawatt facility, a five gigawatt facility, what is realistic for space and what does that look like in mass yeah so very large data centers on earth are usually used for training large models so you need a very highly internally networked cluster to train a frontier model it's a in space for a long time we're probably not going to be docking together things and so most of the workloads we're going to be doing in space is running inference and that's usually for things like coding agents and back office business processing agents and chat gpt queries so the the roadmap is we launch a bunch of things like this so the 200 kilowatt one we can launch 50 per starship so you're talking about close to 10 kilowatts sorry 10 megawatts of new compute capacity per starship launch and we've filed with the scc for a constellation of 88 000 of those that's crazy yeah so and that's just the first 88,000 so that was the first 88,000 I mean we're not stopping there so that enables us to

deploy the first 20 gigawatts we think we can fit about 10 terawatts in this dawn-dusk sun synchronous orbit so that's about 20 times the entire US power grid and then once we run out of that we can go to Cislunua, Mio, BeyondGeo and to the Grange points. And we can, yeah, essentially, if you want to scale much more compute than you really need to do in space. So will we have access to sunlight on Earth if we have so many solar panels up? Yes. And the reason is... Because I saw, was it Starcloud 3? It's four square kilometers in orbit? What is that? Yeah, Starcloud 3 will take a while before we start docking together these large structures, but even when we do, they won't ever cast a shadow on the Earth.

And the reason is they're flying over the poles. So if this is the sun who is here and this is Earth spinning on its axis, they fly over the poles like this. And so the Earth will never create a shadow on our satellite, and our satellite will never create a shadow on Earth. So they never go behind or in front of Earth, basically. The more you know.

viable for Falcon 9 or Starship? Yeah, so as I mentioned, booking is just put your credit card down, but then that kicks off a whole long process where both regulatory, we have to fire with the FCC for the orbit and for the spectrum we're going to use, and we have to have a de-orbit procedure and all of these kinds of things and then SpaceX has a whole laundry list of requirements mainly to be honest to make sure that your spacecraft isn't going to destroy any other spacecraft on the stack so if you book a fully dedicated Falcon 9 the requirements are less stringent than if you're booking a rideshare because they need to make sure you're not going to move the whole stack or you're not going to have things flying off and killing other spacecraft damn yeah so how do they actually verify your like your approvals so we have to do vibe and then we send them the vibe reports after we've done the vibe testing has anybody ever

lied i don't think so it would be quite hard to lie i mean reproducing these vibe reports is uh would be quite a challenge i don't know why you would do that unless you're an op. Unless you're an op. Unless you're an op. There you go. Jeez, I think we just uncovered something. Okay, cool. How good is AI at real professional work? Mercore's AI Productivity Index, or APEX, tracks it with every major frontier model release. Built with partners like Harvey and Cognition, see where the frontier actually stands at mercore.com slash APEX. Today's episode is sponsored by VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech.

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Visit deal.com slash sorcery. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash sorcery. All right, so we're walking on through to the laser lab. How many people work at StarCloud? Right now it's 30 people at StarCloud. Wow, that's it? That's it, yeah, yeah. Oh, my God. 30, only two non-engineers. And so we'll probably have 50 by the end of the year, maybe 100 by the end of next year. But we very deliberately keep the team extremely lean. As I say, we have the most kick-ass engineering team on planet Earth. This will become a full laser lab, so we'll use this for cutting and welding of aluminum and things. We just want to show you the...

We have a little demo for you. make things go zap yeah yeah hi this is camilla who's uh we want to give you a mic and you can talk through it or do you want to talk yeah yeah you can you can you can have a little watch demo so this is our cnc x-tool laser cutter we use this to do quick prototyping on different types of materials um it just gives us a lot of different flexibility of getting things done as fast as possible so right now I just have a little demo with some 30 thou stainless sorry for the compressor a little loud but um you'll see just how fast and how quick like how quick this can do very complex cuts and it's extremely accurate so I'm nervous if you want to get the camera in there you can probably here you can go in there bro thanks all right ready to go fire yeah i can't see it's too reflection you'll you'll see it here oh my god it's so cute it's a little present for you that's awesome I got some here that are ready oh my god so stuff like this helps a lot to move quickly and it gives a lot of flexibility and this just a start we're gonna get a much larger professional machines wow is this your favorite tool or one of them one of them the next one's gonna be my favorite what is it it's gonna be a

an amada uh fiber laser cutter uh so that we can fit material that's up to i believe five by ten peep So it's a professional-grade laser cutter. So it's going to be significantly more capable than this one is. Damn. That's fun. Yeah. Thank you. Of course. And as I understand, you yourself... Oh, really? Okay, I got to keep it. I can take it if you want me to put it in my pocket. Here, I'll give it to Brett. Alright, so we walked through... Fab shop, assembly area, laser. We'll be assembling a clean room, which I don't think we showed you, but that's on the other side. But as I understand, you yourself are actually a proficient welder. Is that true?

I made a very bold claim, but I did learn how to weld in college. I think we should put this to the test. I think your viewers would find this very exciting. I am down to dry. I was called a prodigy, so we'll see if that's still the case. We'll find out. We'll find out. So, we have some welding materials back here. Shall we get you in? Sure. Do I have to like, should I change everything? Yeah, you need to change. Then I'll change. All right, we've now advanced. We're now with Miguel, the engineering operations lead here at StarCloud. What are you going to show us today, and what's your background? Yeah, so we're going to do a little bit of welding, just traditional welding. We do a lot of laser welding here at StarCloud, but But we can also fabricate pretty much anything out of steel, aluminum, titanium, stainless steel.

So we're set up for doing MIG welding right now. So we're going to have you run some beads and make some sparks. And yeah, so before here, I was the welder for Helion Energy, where we built fusion generators. I ran their fabrication shop over there for over a year. And before that, I've been working at a lot of different fab shops, doing architectural, structural, you know, welding and fabrication. And before that, I spent a decade in the U.S. Army. Oh, my God. Deploying overseas. How did you get into welding? I wanted to do something very different. I wanted to do something that was, you know, neutral.

So in the sense that I was contributing to society in a different way. So I decided to get into fabrication and welding after listening to Mike Rowe, the guy from Dirty Jobs. he said you know united states really needs welders and it needs people to build stuff with their hands and i was like well i can build stuff with my hands so that led me to this career path which has been very rewarding it's very satisfying yeah it's a lot of fun yeah it's a lot of fun a lot of fun that sounds like you you posted recently on x somebody was like american needs more welders and you're like posting about how good you are at welding now we're gonna find out now we're gonna find out I used to be very good so for background this is like not at all in this world but I went to college for studio art like I grew up as an artist and I was also very entrepreneurial so I ended up going that path but I went to college for art and so the first year of studio art you do every discipline every practice and one of them we went and we did metal work woodwork glass blowing nice all of the fun flame stuff like it was so fun and then i'm like well making this for fun isn't really a job you know like it's like it's you might as well be doing that but at

trades so like i don't really understand that but it was so much fun nice and i was called the prodigy so we will see we're going to find out we're going to give you a little bit of ppe so the sparks can't burn you. So just put this jacket on and we're gonna give you some. Should I tie my hair back? I don't think I have it, but I'll just keep it in here. As long as it's behind you, you're fine. And make sure that you button at least a couple of the buttons. I'll button it on. As long as you have all this on, closed-toe shoes, you'll be just fine. If you feel anything hot, just stop and step back, but you should be perfectly fine.

Yeah, I remember we weren't allowed to wear any polyester. Mm-hmm, yeah. You Perfect. And then you can do your sleeves as well. You haven't done any of this? Why? He's never here. Traveling the world. It's true. He's always on stage somewhere. Why aren't you in the shop? So, we'll have you put this on first, so the way you put it on goes over your head. And you click this, and then you can leave this up, right? Then when it's time to weld, you can put it down. You can see through it just fine. and the second that you start welding it'll auto darken okay so you don't have to worry about doing anything all you have to do is put it on crank this down okay you'll be ready to go yeah I'm gonna do the same put on some PPE do you have a like any kind of glass I'm gonna be quite far you can use the same one right there. This one? Yep, you can put that on. Who is she?

Very nice. That one my hand skipped a little bit. Yep, that's fine. Still count. We can do one more if you want. Okay, one more. All right, last one. This is one that counts. All right. Stay nice and tight. Closer. Nice. All right, you're hired. Not bad. Good job. Let's go. Nice. America needs welders. Woo. Nice job. Cool. Thank you, Miguel. You're very welcome. This was so much fun. Good job. That's my real reaction. So on a scale of one to ten, what are we talking about here? Here's a solid five. Wow. That's amazing. I've been working for 10 years and don't do a job like that. Damn! Damn, there you go.

That's pretty good. You must pay attention and take good instructions. That's right. We do. I am. That's great. Cool, thank you. They just lifted the satellite. I don't know if you want to. Maybe it's too late to get footage of that. But if you want, we just. Yeah, let's go over there. So we just did the welding. And you crushed it. I'm a five out of 10. he didn't say out of 10 it could be out of five he did say out of 10 did he yes i thought he said you're a solid five you're a solid five out of ten did he okay okay it's like damn that's pretty good um okay but i was i was wondering like how does the flow change of how many people are working on the floor versus up in the offices through the different stages and processes of building out star cloud too yeah um so actually most people you can see uh are both engineering and we have all the engineers make sure that they uh are hands-on with the satellite as well so half the time these people will be upstairs designing stuff on cad the other half the time they're down here fiddling with wires and testing stuff we also have a technician team that was miguel um we got four technicians um some more coming on soon maybe five now i don't want to get

it wrong and their job is like welding and fabrication making actually producing the satellite so yeah Miguel's team with the whole compute module here is a aluminum box that they in-house produced and fabricated and I am contributing you are contributing huge amount whenever you need me let me know i can come on for your listeners it is official you have now done more welding at star cloud than i have wow you gotta really visit miguel i think he's waiting for you to yeah yeah put in some work yeah you're not doing enough yeah bailey tell us a little bit about yourself i know we're in front of star cloud 2 and something just happened and you guys are testing things but we'd love to learn more about you and how you contributed? So I'm the engineering manager here at StarCloud and what we're doing right now is a leak check of the prop system so right now we have a fully fueled electric propulsion system ion thruster and we are testing it after VIBE to make sure that we didn't introduce any cracks or other leaks during the VIBE test. How did you come here? How did you get to StarCloud? It was a bit of a long journey so I started my career at SpaceX in aerospace I spent about four years there then I did a couple other side quests and like

biotech and consumer product design, those didn't really stick. We moved on to Fusion Energy, which was really cool, but at the end of that three-year stint, I realized I'm a space nerd, I need to be working on space to be happy. And fortunately, living in Seattle, there's a ton of cool companies in the area, but StarCloud really stuck out. Back then, they had a different name, and got in contact with the founders super early on, and the rest is history. What's your favorite thing about Phillip? You can't do that, you can't do that. What do you hate about him? What's your least favorite thing?

Yeah, what do you hate about him? What's your least favorite thing? We don't say hate. Got it. What's your biggest challenge with Philip over here? Does he not give you enough attention? What's going on? Let's work this out on camera. It's a two-sided coin or whatever, but like the office is very busy with tours and things like that all the time. We got to go. Yeah, there you go. There you go. There you go. There you go. He's like, I have to work. Stop interviewing me. That was the politest way to tell you to fuck off. Oh, my God. Damn, Bailey. Give me the mic. Oh, that's funny. Okay, so what are you most looking forward to?

What is your favorite part of the process? I think the next thing I'm looking forward to most is obviously the launch for sure. I'm going to be tremendously proud of this. Like a lot of blood, sweat, and literal tears into this thing. as far as the whole design process goes i would say kind of the test is my favorite part that's where the rubber really hits the road so this recent vibration test was a really big one and then the cooling system was another big one where back when we were in colorado not long ago that was our first like full up integrated test of the whole cooling system which was kind of like my baby from day one so it's really cool to see that up and running too so everybody always asks about what the hardest thing about star cloud is and it's the thermal system these radiators in particular and Bailey was responsible for designing fabricating the radiators and also Bailey is responsible for this satellite being here so we had in the end state we only had three weeks to do the final assembly of all of the satellite and Bailey went down basically built that bus by scratch from scratch so where'd you build it in Colorado in our bus provider's office oh my god all

has raised $450 million in total. What are you using the money for? Yeah. How is the capital being utilized? Yeah. Well, right now, so launch is very constrained right now, especially from 2028, 2029 onwards. So a portion of that cash is going to reserving launch slots. A bunch of it's going to fitting out these places and then hiring and materials and everything else.

Yeah, we're making about a million dollars a week on interest right now. Oh, my God. A million dollars a month, sorry, on interest. Wow. But soon we'll be spending. Brex has a really good treasury product. We do use Brex, actually, and they do have a great treasury product. Oh, my God. I know, I get a good interest on that. There you go, yeah. So one major thing that has been a topic of discussion as global competition heats up and satellites become the greatest asset for national security is what happens if someone tries to shoot it down or our adversaries get in contact with it or maybe there's a listening device.

apparently there was one at OpenAI, so how do you think through the national security concerns when it comes to chips and data centers in space? Yeah, so it's a great point and one we think a lot about. It's actually a lot harder to shoot down a satellite than it is to, for example, blow up a data center in Virginia, which is surprising because and the reason is satellites are traveling at about 17 000 miles an hour and so to target and have some kind of kinetic impact on a satellite at that speed is very difficult and we know this one of the reasons we have pretty good case study actually from the starlink satellite so starlink is being used in ukraine and also star shield and it's not like the russians are particularly happy about that and so both in terms of cyber and in terms of the physical security satellites we can we can kind of See the tactics people are using already on Starlink. And so, yeah, we're using the same kind of cryptography for making sure that the satellites are secure from that perspective. And then, yeah, anything that approaches a satellite would be very visible. So anything bigger than one inch cube, you could track in space. And so we would see if somebody was tampering with our satellites, and it would be considered an act of war. You know, there's this outer space treaty which governs what you can and can't do.

do and that would be considered an act of war on the u.s and that's the purpose the primary purpose of space force one of the one of the key purposes is to you know they're developing interceptors and things to dissuade offensive action so as we just finished walking through the hq seeing the tracking of star cloud one the development of star cloud two and some of the early innings of star cloud three what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months definitely the thing i'm most looking forward to is the launch of star cloud two uh so that's going to happen in january and it's going to be a huge proof point uh with the radiators and everything else we've designed in there exciting well thank you so much philip thanks so much for coming cool hey it's molly if you enjoy our interviews check out our newsletter sorcery.vc where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews subscribe to sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on youtube spotify apple or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.