# Nvidia GPUs in Orbit: Inside Starcloud’s $2B Factory Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Philip Johnston says orbital data centers can beat terrestrial economics if launch costs fall below around $500 a kilo. - Show: Sourcery - Hosts: [Molly O'Shea](https://realalpha.app/people/molly-oshea/) - Guest: [Philip Johnston](https://realalpha.app/builders/philip-johnston/) · Co-Founder & CEO, Starcloud - Guest: [Ezra Feilden](https://realalpha.app/people/ezra-feilden/) · Co-Founder & CTO, Starcloud - Guest: [Adi Oltean](https://realalpha.app/builders/adi-oltean/) · Co-Founder & Chief Engineer, Starcloud - Published: Oct 31, 2026 - Length: 1 h 10 m ## The best minutes - [31:37](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1897) [Orbital data centers get cheaper below $500 per kilo](https://realalpha.app/s/orbital-data-centers-get-cheaper-below-500-per-kilo/) (2 min) - [33:42](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2022) [Chip failures could make or break orbital data center economics](https://realalpha.app/s/chip-failures-could-make-or-break-orbital-data-center/) (4 min) - [2:53](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=173) [Starcloud repaired a broken vibration table in one weekend](https://realalpha.app/s/starcloud-repaired-a-broken-vibration-table-in-one-weekend/) (4 min) ## Also worth watching - [26:35](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1595) [Falcon 9's phaseout leaves a launch gap before Starship scales](https://realalpha.app/s/falcon-9s-phaseout-leaves-a-launch-gap-before-starship/) (4 min) - [1:02:57](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3777) [Starcloud plans to build toward 100 satellites a week](https://realalpha.app/s/starcloud-plans-to-build-toward-100-satellites-a-week/) (3 min) - [40:45](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2445) [SpaceX sets a roughly 40 Hz floor for satellite resonance](https://realalpha.app/s/spacex-sets-a-roughly-40-hz-floor-for-satellite-resonance/) (6 min) Skip the Alpha Centauri mission, the SpaceX–Tesla valuation discussion, the welding demonstration, and the sponsor reads. ## Summary Philip Johnston is Starcloud's CEO and cofounder. Ezra Feilden is its CTO and cofounder; before Starcloud, he designed satellites at Airbus and earned a PhD in materials engineering. Adi Oltean, Starcloud's chief engineer and cofounder, previously worked at SpaceX and Microsoft, where he worked on large-scale GPU deployments. Johnston says orbital data centers can undercut terrestrial facilities only if launch costs fall below around $500 a kilo; he bases the case on continuous sunlight and avoiding land and battery costs. Starcloud's founders describe cooling, radiators, chip burn-in and vibration testing as key engineering challenges. They see satellite-imagery inference as an early use case, while Johnston outlines a path to a large orbital constellation and a proposed mission to Alpha Centauri. Johnston also discusses launch capacity, factory expansion and security risks for orbital infrastructure. ### Minute by minute - [0:44](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=44) **Starcloud tracks its first satellite.** Johnston shows Starcloud 1's live position and visibility footprint, explaining that it travels about 17,000 miles per hour and circles Earth in about an hour and a half. He says it carries the first Nvidia H100s in space. - [2:33](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=153) **A repaired table kept testing on schedule.** Johnston says Starcloud bought a broken used vibration table for $200,000 rather than pay about $1.5 million and wait nearly two years for a new one. Feilden says the 16-ton machine had a major internal leak, but the team repaired it over a weekend to complete spacecraft-level testing. - [6:53](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=413) **Seattle offered satellite talent.** Johnston says Starcloud went from founding to orbit in 21 months, compared with four years for the fastest earlier example he knew. He says the founders moved to Redmond after finding satellite engineering talent there, with about half the team coming from SpaceX and the rest from AWS and Azure. - [9:34](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=574) **Cooling drives Starcloud 2 engineering.** Feilden says Starcloud 2's solar panels deploy via a latch and that the company integrates much of the spacecraft in-house, including solar panels and radiators. He calls cooling and radiators the largest technical challenge, with the remaining task being to make them cheap and manufacturable at scale. - [12:57](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=777) **A low-cost path to Alpha Centauri.** Johnston says he and his cofounders created a nonprofit to send a spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri using solar-powered Hall-effect ion thrusters. He describes a proposed trajectory costing $10 million to $15 million, with five years spiraling toward the sun and another five years firing near perihelion; he says the journey would take about 80,000 years. - [19:09](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1149) **Johnston predicts SpaceX can top $100 trillion.** Johnston predicts SpaceX could be worth more than $100 trillion in 10 years if things go to plan and there is no world war. He says Tesla's Optimus could drive recursive growth by building more factories, and asserts that SpaceX will buy Tesla. - [24:08](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1448) **Starcloud 3 targets Starship scale.** Feilden describes Starcloud 3 as a roughly two-ton vehicle with 235 kilowatts of power, designed so up to 50 units can deploy on a Starship launch. Starcloud has used Falcon 9 rideshares so far, but he says Starship is the future for the larger platform. - [26:35](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1595) **Launch slots are tightening.** Johnston says Starcloud booked its first Falcon 9 rideshare about 21 months ahead. He says Falcon 9 rideshare is winding down before Starship is ready, creating a launch crunch; insurance can cover a launch failure but cannot compensate for lost time. - [30:58](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1858) **Orbital economics hinge on launch costs.** Johnston says orbital data centers become cheaper than terrestrial ones if launch costs fall below around $500 a kilo. He says the model avoids permitted-land costs and batteries, with continuous sunlight, and cites a Starcloud 2 radiator he says has at least 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation and about 500 times less cost per watt than the ISS radiator. - [33:42](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2022) **Chip failures could break the model.** Johnston says radiation-related chip failures may matter more to Starcloud's economics than cooling because chips are its most expensive component. He says a 10 or 20 percent higher failure rate in space could undermine the model, so Starcloud 2 ran its chips at full power for a three-month burn-in period. - [35:39](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2139) **Orbital inference starts with satellite data.** Johnston says Starcloud 1 carries three Nvidia chips, two from ARM and AMD CPUs. The team used the hardware to train NanoGPT in space and run an early version of Gemini, and now runs inference on satellite imagery for government customers to return insights such as vessel coordinates in minutes rather than hours or days. - [38:30](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2310) **Starcloud outlines constellation-scale compute.** Johnston says the company filed for a constellation of 88,000 satellites and believes the dawn-dusk orbit could fit about 10 terawatts of compute, roughly 20 times the entire U.S. power grid. He says the satellites would fly over the poles and would not cast shadows on Earth. - [40:45](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2445) **Spaceflight testing governs satellite design.** Johnston says vibration tests reproduce launch frequencies and shock to check that components will not detach or resonate. He puts SpaceX's minimum first-mode frequency at around 40 hertz, and says launches also require FCC filings for orbit and spectrum, a de-orbit procedure and SpaceX safety reviews. - [49:05](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2945) **Starcloud keeps fabrication in-house.** Johnston says Starcloud has 30 people, only two of them non-engineers, and deliberately keeps the team lean. The tour shows in-house laser prototyping, welding and fabrication; Johnston says engineers split their time between design work and hands-on satellite work. - [1:02:57](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3777) **Factory growth brings new constraints.** Johnston says Starcloud is fitting out about 100,000 square feet across three buildings for a production line targeting 100 satellites a week. He says the company has raised $450 million and is reserving launch slots because access will be constrained from 2028 onward. He argues that satellites moving about 17,000 miles per hour are harder to shoot down than ground data centers, and says objects larger than a one-inch cube can be tracked in space. ## Transcript Sourcery, hosted by Molly O'Shea, with Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean. Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [0:00](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=0) 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. That's the satellite we launched in November last year with the first Nvidia H100s on board. Starcloud One, separation confirmed. They told us it would cost $75 million to $100 million to do Starcloud One. 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 US power grid. [0:30](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=30) It's around two tons, fully loaded, 235 kilowatts, and we can deploy up to 50 of them per Starship launch. Do you think Tesla will merge with SpaceX? This isn't a hot take, this is just a fact. SpaceX is going to buy Tesla. We're here at StarCloud in the Seattle region. Not gonna disclose the exact location because it's a secret right philip top secret top secret okay we're with philip johnston the ceo and we're going to go through the two billion dollar company and what they're building behind us so welcome to star cloud on the screen we actually have the location of star cloud one so that's the satellite we launched in november last year with the first NVIDIA h100s on board this little green area is everything that it's visible anywhere on earth where you have a line site to the satellite because it 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. So if we come back in half an hour you'll probably find it over Africa somewhere. Yeah it's moving fast. And before we walked over here it was down here. Something special happened over here? Oh yeah yeah so it actually just came over Cabo which is where I [1:51](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=111) proposed to my fiancee and it only comes over there once every three days. So I waited till 6 a.m. and then showed her on the phone because I'd written a proposal on StarCloud One. Yeah. So yeah. It's cute. Check out the post if you haven't yet. Okay. All right. So we're going to walk through the facility. Just give us like a sense of what we'll be looking at, what stages of development. Are we going to see StarCloud One, StarCloud Two, maybe? Yeah. StarCloud Three anywhere close? Yeah well so Starcloud 1 is launched, Starcloud 2 we have in the assembly facility. As I say it's we are this is midway through moving so please take it with a pinch of salt there's boxes everywhere and 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 and then we'll go through and we'll finish the tour in the some of the newer facilities that we're bringing online next year. [2:42](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=162) 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 testing so this is our vibe table here fun story about this vibe table is we we we were we actually had i'm going to move around here so you can see it um so we couldn't find a vibe table in the u.s that would vibe with a pressure vessel on there in the time we needed and the lead time on new vibe tables is about uh like almost two years now oh no yeah so and it's about 1.5 million dollars for a new vibe table so we actually bought this secondhand broken vibe table for 200 grand and then the team worked all weekend to fix it up um i don't know if you can see maybe we can go around you can see how janky like the amp that we bought for it isn't it all right we have a new entrant on the video so we're here with Ezra Ezra is also a co-founder do you want to give a couple sentences on your background and then we'll talk about the vibe table for sure yeah my name is Ezra Fielding I'm the co-founder and CTO at StarCloud before StarCloud [3:59](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=239) I was with Airbus, designing and building satellites, focusing on large deployable structures, which is a very critical piece of what we're building here. And then before that, I did my PhD in materials engineering. Damn. So yeah, we're standing in front of our Vive table, our very old, very beasting up Vive table. We had to get this on an extremely short lead time. and new vibe tables are you know 26 monthly time over a million dollars and that didn't work for our schedule so the only option available to us and we had to do this test in-house for for various reasons so the only option available to us was to get a secondhand vibe table and this one I can tell you has had a life it is as old as I am it came to us filled with water no and with a horrendous internal leak um so there's very high voltage inside there's um obviously it's vibrating and there's high temperatures and um right in the heart of all of that there was a very large leak which is the reason why the previous owner sold it evidently um so we didn't realize that until [5:11](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=311) **Ezra Feilden:** we got it in house um you know two days before the test essentially um and so through the weekend like evenings and weekends we had to absolutely hustle to tear this thing down right to the core [5:23](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=323) um repair the leak we had an expert who from um um basically like the the country's experts in vibe tables come and tell us that the repair is is not possible um and uh and we pressed on and um we got it limping along at least um enough to complete our spacecraft level vibe test so do you find this on like facebook marketplace like where do we find old vibe tables yes it tends to be auction houses um yeah surplus auction houses when companies go out of business uh they um they get rid of all their assets and um yeah that's it's a bit of a um yeah there's some diamonds in the rough there for sure um it's not easy to move there's about 60 tons oh my god 16 tons so 16 sorry 16 tons yeah yeah which is uh yeah a bit of a beast it's hefty um and um you know to run just to power this thing we need a generator so we have a very large generator outside i know when i was pulling up i was like oh we're in kind of like a warehouse office park which one could possibly be store cloud probably the one with huge generators outside yeah that's us yeah but yeah i mean this is um when you have extremely tight timelines when you're trying to do new things very quickly you often find yourself in these these kind of situations where you have to [6:43](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=403) get very creative and hustle and basically not take no for an answer and just be incredibly scrappy. And that's our superpower as a startup, I think, is the ability to turn these crazy scenarios around and make a success of them. It's a great point because StarCloud, you guys 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 [8:00](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=480) 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. [9:11](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=551) 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? [9:53](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=593) 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? [10:48](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=648) 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 [12:10](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=730) 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. [12:51](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=771) 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. [13:29](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=809) 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. [14:08](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=848) 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. [14:47](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=887) 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 [15:54](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=954) 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. [16:27](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=987) 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 [17:35](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1055) 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. [18:27](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1107) 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? [19:07](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1147) 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. [19:50](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1190) 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. [20:36](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1236) 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 [21:48](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1308) 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. [22:30](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1350) 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 [24:00](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1440) 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 [25:29](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1529) 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 coming up as well so our first launch was with falcon 9 so yeah falcon 9 rideshare mission um our upcoming launches uh all with falcon um and um yeah it's really it's really hard to beat the [27:00](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1620) the the benefits and the economics of rideshare when you're when you're producing single missions like we are at the moment um the future is definitely starship um and that's what we're we're gearing up for here what's the process like for booking a ride for so booking ride share is um unbelievably easy so it was actually the basically the first thing we did as a company was we booked the launch for star cloud one do you have to book it really far in advance like how do you how do you i mean you're like gunning for getting on the vehicle but like how does that work yeah so we we booked about um yeah 21 months in advance um and the process is the the initial booking is um you can pay for it with a credit card you can get a confirmation uh straight away you could you could yeah ride share is uh falcon 9 ride show is going away though so um these were the rosy days when um it was much easier to get a single um payload launched um so we're in a It's a transitionary period at the moment where Falcon 9 is being wound down and Starship has yet to be wound up. [28:07](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1687) So we're definitely in a crunch time at the moment when it comes to launch. What is the process for that though? Do you need insurance? What happens if it doesn't go to plan? Insurance is relatively inexpensive for Falcon 9 because it has such a strong track record, 300 launches, consecutive launches without a failure. um but um so you can ensure the uh a failure on launch you know the rocket explodes the payload doesn't separate that kind of thing um it's much more difficult to ensure things going wrong with the spacecraft as it's you know this is the first first spacecraft of its type to be built um so we got insurance for the for the launch um and um you know that can if something goes wrong then that can give you a bit of a financial payout but what we what it can't compensate you for is the lost time which is really the most valuable resource for like a fast-moving startup so yeah i'm slightly on the fence of the value of ensuring payloads but um yeah we'll take it case by case we were just at rocket lab and we did a tour we did a series there and the one topic that keeps on getting delayed is neutron how do you think that will or will not affect the market if and when it starts to be serviceable yeah it's um yeah they i think [29:36](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1776) yes just yesterday they probably announced the um the first flight will be 2027 um you know Composite manufacturing is really hard. I know from personal experience, very large composite structures often take a bit longer than you expect, especially when you're producing them for the first time and you're running the tooling for the first time. I have a lot of faith that Rocket Lab can get Neutron flying regularly. They've proven that they, you know, 100 launches of Electron, so they can do scale. 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 [30:57](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1857) 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, and I know we talked about this with Addy, is the economics of this. You are making more economical satellites going out in space and the vehicle itself and so that's one thing and so I'd love. [32:00](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1920) break that down in the economics there and then also further drill down the difference between on land like terrestrial data centers versus orbital yeah um so the whole thing is actually contingent on the launch cost um so if the launch cost gets below around 500 a kilo then it will be much cheaper to do this in space than terrestrially and i think a sort of good comparison for this is if you build a new solar project on earth to power a data center because solar is kind of the cheapest form of energy we have terrestrially and so the way you can think about it is solar terrestrially has these three big costs the biggest cost is the cost of permitted land depending where you are second biggest cost is the cost of batteries storage and backup power [32:43](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1963) **Philip Johnston:** and then the last cost is the cost of the solar cells themselves and so in space number one we don't need permitted land so your biggest cost is gone we don't need batteries and backup power because they're 24-7 in the Sun and then we need eight times less solar cells [32:57](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=1977) because one square meter of solar panel in space produces about eight 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 so that's where this trade-off comes and that's where we see when you run those numbers you come out to about $500 a kilo where it makes more sense to do in space than terrestrially. And of course right now with Starship we're at about $5,000 a kilo, sorry with Falcon 9 the design of starship is designed to produce launch costs of uh internal launch costs for spacex of sort of 20 to 20 to 40 dollars a kilo um so so long as they pass that launch cost through to us at anything less than say 10 times their marginal launch cost or even more uh whether that makes sense for us um right now by the way in falcon 9 they charge two or three times their marginal launch cost so it seems reasonable yeah another thing that i listened to so i listened to handful of your interviews one of the other very concerning points is chips and chip failures so how does that work into the model yeah for sure it's actually a super uh like relevant point i think it's actually more relevant and pertinent than even cooling which is people think is the [34:11](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2051) biggest challenge we've basically solved the cooling challenge um the other part of it that we're working on is the radiation shielding and testing all the chips in different particle accelerators to make sure they can survive the radiation environment of space and the reason we put so much time into that is if the chips have you know like a 10 or 20 percent higher failure rate in space than they do on the ground then the whole economics of the model fall apart and the reason is the chips are by far the most expensive part of what we're doing actually and so there's a few ways that you you can go around that i mean essentially we're not going to have access to the satellites once they launch so they operate a bit like the way the starlink satellites work which is you need to have redundancy on critical systems you know things like pumps and then you over provision things which fail over time like the solar panels you're going to lose a few percent per year so you slightly over provision that um and then on the chips we have a longer burning period on the ground um most chips actually fail in the first period of their life and so if you can put them through a more rigorous burn why is that i don't [35:10](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2110) No, it's basically, they call it infant mortality of the chips. Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, my God. I know, it sounds kind of terrible. That's horrible. So what you want is to get through the infancy period and find out all those failures. [35:25](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2125) **Philip Johnston:** So for StarCloud 2, we had a three-month burn-in period, it basically means you run the chips hot for three months so you can find all those failures early. [35:32](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2132) It's basically like, yeah, if you can survive, if the chips can survive three months at full power the chance they have a failure from that point onwards diminishes very dramatically versus the chance to have a failure in the first three months so you have five chips up in space right now including one each 100 yes what are they doing um so actually we have yes we have three chips from NVIDIA, two from ARM and we also have some CPUs from AMD on StarCloud One. And what they're doing is, at the moment, we use them to do some interesting workloads, like train the first model in space, NanoGPT from Andre Carpathy. [36:09](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2169) We ran the first version of Gemini, but now they're actually doing useful workloads for government customers. So they are mainly in sort of as a test phase, but we're doing inference on satellite imagery, so on synthetic aperture radar data, on hyperspectral data. So we actually just will do an announcement about some of the results of this, but we've got some very interesting results. And the use case for that 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. [36:46](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2206) So if they can run inference on that at the edge, we can then send down the insight much quicker. and so for example if they're monitoring a patch of water they might want to know is there a vessel crossing some some boundary at the moment what they do is they take an enormous amount of imagery and then they have to wait at least an hour and a half to get to a ground station and then they try and downlink as much as they can but that's usually not very much once we're in space we have a bunch of optical terminals on our satellite in real time they can send data to us we can then run the inference workloads on our satellite and then we can downlink the coordinates of a vessel for example, in minutes rather than hours and days, which is the current way that this works. [37:27](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2247) That's wild. Oh my gosh. So our initial use cases for these satellites and what they're doing right now, all the satellite operators and that kind of data, when do you think it'll 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. [38:27](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2307) 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 [39:45](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2385) 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. [40:33](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2433) 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. The more you know. Science. So, Philip, we're back at the vibe table, and we're about to do some testing. Do you want to explain this? Yeah, so we need to simulate the launch environment. And so in order for SpaceX to allow us to launch on a rocket with multiple tenants, they want to make sure that both nothing's going to fly off from any individual satellite in launch, But also, they don't want any satellite to resonate at a certain frequency, which throws the whole stack off. [41:23](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2483) And so the point of the VibeTable is to put the satellite through every different frequency and amplitude that the satellite is going to experience during launch, and also this shock test, so that we make sure nothing flies off and we also make sure that we don't have resonance at a certain frequency. How long do you run it for? It depends on the test, but the launch environment itself is about seven minutes. and so there are some tests we would run for a few minutes most tests we run for a shorter period especially what they call uh the sort of um yeah like random vibe we run a bit longer but there is the shock test we run for shorter have you ever sat on a vital i have never sat on that i have to say yeah people i've touched them before but we were at zipline and we went into their testing room and they had a vibe table and these like rc propeller like rc fans oh yeah to test the drones with and they would fly them in front of it and see if anything would you know be fragile or break if there were any, like, fractures and it ended up just being me walking through RC bands. [42:37](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2557) No way. Which is, I think they go like 80 miles an hour. Wow. Yeah. Crazy. Oh, there you go. Oh. So this is a very low frequency test. We're doing it at low frequencies, mainly so that you can see what it looks like when it moves, but when it moves faster, basically you won't be able to see it moving. that's... they're moving at least 50 hertz, so 50 times back and forth per second, and this is basically a huge solenoid, so a huge magnet that's pulling this thing in and out. It's basically speeding up now. So we lock in? Yeah, we're good. so the hardware we have on the table at the moment is part of our thermal management system called the accumulator so as the so we have liquid cooling on star cloud 2 and all of our future vehicles as the liquid heats up it wants to expand and so you have to have a component which allows that expansion to take place otherwise you'll burst your your cooling system so that's what the accumulator does it's uh it allows for that thermal expansion of the fluid to manage the pressure inside the cooling system. [43:51](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2631) And that's what we have on the table right now is the accumulator for StarCloud 2. We get... yeah, go for it. Yeah, yeah. There you go. So... Oh my god! Cloud's crazy! Yeah, so this is... right now the test it's doing is what's called a sine sweep. It's where we're going to go through every different frequency and amplitude that the satellite will experience during launch so it starts very low frequency we're doing this 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 it won't really be able to see the moving of it what is the worst thing that a vibe table has done the worst thing that a vibe table well has a vibe table like ever like as a magnet like shot out or anything? 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. So, for example, underneath StarCloud 2, we have this xenon tank for the thrusters. And if the xenon tank explodes, it's about half the explosive power of a hand grenade. Great. That's awesome. That's really good to know. [45:20](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2720) yeah okay that's why we're not doing that test today so yeah so does everyone leave the building when you test that literally everybody leaves the building so we had we put this entire satellite uh on this by the way you can see it's in two axes so the solenoid actually can flip up and we can test it like this so that we can test uh in different accesses but yeah when we fire that tester we have to everybody has to leave the building i doubt the toy manufacturer that has storage across the street has any idea what's going on in here they have no idea but they are far enough away that we know that uh they're good they're safe yeah why is everyone running out yeah yeah that's first mode uh okay okay so what they're testing for is this first mode it's the first frequency at which is resonating and when you can hear it making this [46:19](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2779) **Philip Johnston:** 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 so it cannot resonate at anything less than 40 times [46:35](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2795) a second and the reason for that is let's say it would resonate like twice a second then the whole thing is gonna go like this back and forth and that will move all the other payloads in the stack. That's a really good point. So what is the process to get your space prop or any kind of components up into space tested to make sure that it's 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 [47:50](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2870) 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. [48:29](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2909) allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. Learn more at getvcx.com. Public is a multi-asset investing platform where you can automate your investing with AI agents. Create your own custom agent with a simple prompt. Agents can monitor markets, execute trading strategies, and manage your cash across stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and more. Want to buy at market close and sell the next day's open? Just tell your agent. Automate your investing at public.com. Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. [49:11](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2951) 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... [49:56](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=2996) 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 [51:53](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3113) 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? [52:41](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3161) 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. [53:25](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3205) 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. [54:02](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3242) 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 [55:17](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3317) 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. [55:52](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3352) 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? [57:13](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3433) 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. [58:21](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3501) 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 [59:38](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3578) 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 [1:00:54](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3654) 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? [1:01:28](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3688) 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? [1:02:05](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3725) 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 right so we're just leaving so the main facility we're now going over here yeah [1:03:11](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3791) we're gonna go to you're buying up the entire 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. So we've got now this middle section that we have now. This will come online in November and then we have access to the third one in February next year. And so this enables us to scale manufacturing for StarCloud 3. And the reason we need so much space, one of the reasons is you have 100 meter, well it's 400 foot deployables on StarCloud 3 that we need to test test the mechanisms on but also to manufacture something like 88,000 you know we're going to need a way bigger facility. I just think Fred's going to trip, I'm so sorry. [1:04:01](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3841) To manufacture 88,000 we're going to need a whole bunch more space so how many do you think you'll [1:04:09](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3849) **Philip Johnston:** be able to produce a day so we'll be up to a hundred a week from what we've got here so 10 a day or more than 10 a day after you so this is one of the three spaces and so we've got about a [1:04:23](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3863) hundred thousand square foot that we can fit out for manufacturing so we're going to remove this wall and we'll remove that wall and then that enables us to this is huge oh my god yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be quite a sight to behold when this is up and running you should throw a halloween party in here with this yeah we're gonna do a we'll do an opening party sometime soon so you're very much welcome i know you're on the road all the time so you never know where i land Who knows? Maybe it wouldn't be in three weeks. I know. Okay, so in here, it's going to look much different than the previous facility. [1:05:04](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3904) It will look pretty similar, actually, to the previous facility. It will look the same? Except with a manufacturing line, like a proper... In the end state, we want it to be like an auto manufacturing line. So, when you see a Tesla factory, you see cars going down the line, it will be exactly like that. Except with Star Club 3 chassis going down the line, with various things being added. how do okay so this is crazy question how does star cloud 3 get to starship uh we load them on the back of a truck and then drive them down the motorway that's it that's it yeah it's very similar to the way um at the moment just down the road from here is where the full starlink facility is so they literally load all those on the back of a truck and then drive them across the country to Florida. Damn. Yeah. 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? 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. [1:06:26](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=3986) 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. [1:07:09](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=4029) 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. [1:08:30](https://realalpha.app/v/mdq6urSx-f8/?t=4110) 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. 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