Inside Starcloud’s $2B Space Factory

I went inside Starcloud’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, right outside of Seattle, to tour the $2.3B company building AI data centers in space. Philip Johnston, CEO & Co-Founder led the tour, alongside technical features with Co-Founder & CTO Ezra Feilden, Co-Founder & Chief Engineer Adi Oltean, as well as Bailey Montaño, Miguel Rivera and Camilo Lopez from the engineering team. Starcloud has raised $450M to put Nvidia GPUs, AI inference and eventually gigawatts of computing infrastructure into orbit. Its latest round was $250M, led by Manhattan West, with Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Benchmark and EQT. The team went from founding to orbit in 21 months. Starcloud 1 launched with the first Nvidia H100 in space. Starcloud 2 launches in January with 100x the power, and Starcloud 3 is designed to deploy up to 50 satellites per SpaceX Starship launch. We cover the economics of orbital vs terrestrial data centers, the $500/kg launch cost threshold, SpaceX rideshare and Nvidia chips in space. We also get into liquid cooling and radiators, radiation and chip burn-in, edge inference for government customers and plans for an 88,000-satellite constellation. We also go behind the scenes of spacecraft testing, including a rebuilt secondhand vibe table, plus laser fabrication and welding. We close with Philip’s take on SpaceX passing $100T and his mission to send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. Philip Johnston: https://x.com/PhilipJohnston Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube: ⁠https://youtu.be/mdq6urSx-f8 https://youtu.be/mdq6urSx-f8 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Harvey http://www.harvey.ai?utm_medium=paid-partner&utm_source=sourcery&utm_campaign=2026-10-brand-sourcery-partnership—The AI platform built for legal work, is helping the best firms and companies close deals faster. More than 200,000 lawyers, 80% of the Am Law 100, and over 20% of the Fortune 500 build with Harvey. Visit: http://harvey.ai/ • Zone https://zonefrontier.com/—develops next-generation data center campuses, partnering with AI companies, site developers and technology leaders to bring compute online faster and at scale. Visit: https://zonefrontier.com https://zonefrontier.com/ • Mercor http://mercor.com/sourcery—The human intelligence behind frontier AI. Frontier labs and leading enterprises use Mercor to turn the knowledge of 5M+ experts into the data, evals and benchmarks that make AI better at real work. Visit:http://mercor.com/sourcery • VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio at http://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure: Paid Ad. Agents are an experimental AI tool. Its output may be inaccurate and is not investment advice. Public Holding’s, Inc. makes no guarantees about its accuracy or reliability—verify independently before use. Brokerage accounts and services provided by Open to the Public Investing, Inc. See additional disclosures at https://public.com/disclosures/agenticdisclosures.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  We're with Philip Johnston, the CEO, and we're going to go through the $2 billion company and what they're building behind us.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  That's the satellite we launched in November last year with the first NVIDIA H100s onboard.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  StarCloud 1 separation confirmed.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  They told us it would cost $75 million to $100 million to do StarCloud 1. We did it for about $2.5 million. If the launch cost gets below around $500 a kilo, then it will be much cheaper to do this in space than terrestrially. We think we can fit about 10 terawatts in this dawn dusk sun synchronous orbit. So that's about 20 times the entire US power grid.

• 0:30Speaker 03

  It's around 2 tons fully loaded, 235 kilowatts, and we can deploy up to 50 of them per starship launch.

• 0:37Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think Tesla will merge with SpaceX?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  This isn't a hot take, this is just a fact. SpaceX is going to buy Tesla.

• 0:53Molly O'Shea?

  We are here at StarCloud in the Seattle region. Not going to disclose the exact location because it's a secret, right Philip?

• 1:00Speaker 04

  Top secret.

• 1:00Molly O'Shea?

  Top secret, okay? We're with Philip Johnston, the CEO, and we're going to go through the $2 billion company and what they're building behind us.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  So, welcome to StarCloud. On the screen, we actually have the location of StarCloud 1. So that's the satellite we launched in November last year with the first NVIDIA H100s onboard. This little green area is everything that is visible. Anywhere on Earth where you have a line of sight 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.

• 1:42Molly O'Shea?

  And before we walked over here, it was down here. Something special happened over here?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So it actually just came over Cabo, which is where I proposed to my fiance. And it only comes over there once every three days. So I waited till 6:00 AM and then showed her on the phone because I'd written the proposal on StarCloud 1.

• 2:00Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 2:02Molly O'Shea?

  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 1, StarCloud 2, maybe?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:15Molly O'Shea?

  StarCloud 3 anywhere close?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  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 some of the newer facilities that we'll bring in online next year.

• 2:43Molly O'Shea?

  Awesome, cool.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Cool. This is the main assembly area for StarCloud 2. And this is the satellite in the background. You can see StarCloud 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 actually had, I'm going to move around here so you can see it. So we couldn't find a vibe table in the US that would vibe with a pressure vessel on there in the time we needed. And the lead time on new vibe tables is about like almost two years now.

• 3:25Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, no.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and it's about $1.5 million 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. 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 is.

• 3:44Molly O'Shea?

  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.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  For sure. Yeah, my name is Ezra Feilden. I'm the co-founder and CTO at StarCloud. Before StarCloud, I was with Airbus designing and building satellites,

• 4:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:15Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  So yeah, we're standing in front of our vibe table. Our very old, very beastin' up vibe table. We had to get this on an extremely short lead time. And new vibe tables are, you know, 26-month lead 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 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.

• 4:51Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  And with a horrendous internal leak. So there's very high voltage inside. There's, obviously it's vibrating, there's high temperatures. And 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. So we didn't realize that until we got it in-house, you know, two days before the test essentially.

• 5:15Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  And so through the weekend, like evenings and weekends, we had to absolutely hustle to tear this thing down right to the core, repair the leak. We had an expert who, from basically like the country's expert in vibe tables, come and tell us that the repair is not possible.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  And we pressed on and we got it limping along at least enough to complete our spacecraft level vibe test.

• 5:43Molly O'Shea?

  So do you find this on like Facebook Marketplace? Like where do we find old vibe tables?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Yes, it tends to be auction houses. Yeah, surplus auction houses. When companies go out of business, they get rid of all their assets. And yeah, that's, it's a bit of a, yeah, there's some diamonds in the rough there for sure.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  It's not easy to move. There's about 60 tons.

• 6:06Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  16 tons.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  Oh, 16, sorry, 16 tons. Which is a bit of a beast.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  It's hefty. And you know, to run, just to power this thing, we need a generator. So we have a very large generator outside.

• 6:22Molly O'Shea?

  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 StarCloud? Probably the one with huge generators outside.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, yeah. But yeah, I mean, this is, 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 get very creative and hustle and basically not take no for an answer. And, and just be incredibly scrappy. And that's, that's, you know, our superpower as a startup, I think, is the ability to turn these crazy scenarios around and make a success of them.

• 7:00Molly O'Shea?

  It's a great point because StarCloud, you guys went from founding to in orbit in 21 months.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is a record. I think the fastest anybody did that before us was four years. And that was basically because Addy and Ezra built the satellite by hand. Yeah, we'll speak with Addy in a minute, but.

• 7:16Molly O'Shea?

  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 Segundo, it's not down in Long Beach, but you guys are up here in the Seattle region. So why Seattle?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so people, no, people don't realize this, but 90% of all satellites launched in the last few years by mass were designed, built and tested in Redmond, Washington, which is exactly where we are now. So 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 going 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, for doing data centers in space, this is literally the best place in the world you could be.

• 8:17Molly O'Shea?

  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?

• 8:26Speaker 04

  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 starship. So if you've ever seen those cool starship videos?

• 8:44Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  I have, well, 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-scale bundles before they were called LLMs in a bunch of data centers and working very closely with NVIDIA on that. And it was like really rewarding to be a part of two keynotes in GTC. 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.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  And then later this year, part of the same keynote in San Jose,

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Jensen introduced SpaceOne, which is one, the very first GPU designed to work in space.

• 9:39Molly O'Shea?

  Damn, yeah. Philip was telling me you've been mentioned in GTC talks multiple times.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Not me personally, but our team, yes.

• 9:47Molly O'Shea?

  That's incredible.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  I helped build the demo.

• 9:49Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. So we're standing in front of StarCloud 2. Do you want to give us a little rundown on it?

• 9:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so people are busy at the moment. They're about to fire the HDRAM, 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 satellite actively. We are testing various systems.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 10:18Molly O'Shea?

  I was really like, I was like, something's gonna explode in here.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Maybe not as climatic 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 solar panels in orbit and make sure you can get kilowatts of power to all our compute.

• 10:42Molly O'Shea?

  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?

• 10:54Speaker 04

  We try to vertically integrate as much as possible. Obviously, we are not manufacturing the Nvidia boards or other high-level compute systems, but we integrate 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. So this is kind of our signature sauce, if you're another HDRM-firing.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  And yeah, we try to integrate as much as possible in-house.

• 11:27Molly O'Shea?

  What's been the biggest technical challenge coming over to Star Cloud?

• 11:33Speaker 04

  I think the cooling system and the radiators 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 focused 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?

• 11:55Molly O'Shea?

  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, this is gonna 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?

• 12:25Speaker 04

  Well, 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 next range of data centers. And we are catalyzing on that and using the same thing, the same technology in space as well.

• 13:12Molly O'Shea?

  For those who don't know about the Fermi Explorer mission, can you explain that and why it's significant for you?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so my co-founder Zadie Azra and I have created a nonprofit with a few others, Kam Gafar and others. We created a nonprofit 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 Star Cloud 1 that you can do things very cheaply. Like, for example, Star Cloud 1, we had a quote from one of the primes. They told us it would cost $75 million to $100 million to do Star Cloud 1. We did it for about $2.5 million.

• 13:46Molly O'Shea?

  No way.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we realized you can do things very cheaply and we found-

• 13:50Molly O'Shea?

  You can just put things in space.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  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 or $15 million. So it's gonna, it won't use any technology that doesn't exist today. It's gonna use solar hall effect ion thrusters with solar to power it. And we're gonna basically spiral in towards the sun for five years. And then we're gonna fire the thruster, 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 gonna fling off in the direction, it's actually not even anywhere close to where Alpha Centauri is today.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 14:56Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  And then by the time we arrive in 80,000 years, you know, maybe for 15,000 years, there's already been a colony, even if your propulsion technology was only 20% 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 10 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 of that happens or it doesn't for some reason. And like, yeah, there's this idea of the Fermi paradox, the idea, the question of why

• 15:39Speaker 01

  we don't see more intelligence in our galaxy or more obvious evidence of it.

• 15:44Molly O'Shea?

  Maybe aliens.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, why our solar system isn't part of a galactic empire, you know?

• 15:50Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  If they, it's pretty quick, like 10 million years to settle the galaxy is the blink of an eye in galactic timeframes. So if there had been intelligent life on any other star, trillion planets in our galaxy, if there'd been intelligent life on any other one in the last 10 billion years, galaxy's been around for more than 10 billion years, then it would have been five million years to settle the whole galaxy. And so it's really kind of concerning that we don't see more evidence of 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 by the way, I'm open to that. I like that idea. Like, maybe we're gonna be the first to settle the galaxy and that's a great privilege.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:40Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  And for some reason, it doesn't survive very long. 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 the galaxy and more about the Fermi paradox and everything.

• 16:52Molly O'Shea?

  How did you get into space and how did you get interested in this?

• 16:55Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I've always been interested in space. Like, I wanted to be an astronaut as a kid, like anybody.

• 16:59Molly O'Shea?

  But why? Like, what exposed you to that? You just-

• 17:04Speaker 01

  I guess like, yeah, sci-fi movies when I was a kid, like I read the Asimov novels, Foundation series. Yeah, it was, there was this, there's this 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, you know, 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. It's 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 nearest star. And well, like, what an incredible privilege that would be.

• 17:49Molly O'Shea?

  So if you wrote a sentimental note on Star Cloud 1, what are you gonna put on the spacecraft?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Definitely gonna put the name of my fiancee on there.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  So for the low, low price of-

• 18:04Molly O'Shea?

  Low, low, oh, you're gonna start selling logo spots? Wow, we got an advertising option.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go. People can go to fermiexplorer.com/donate and people can put whatever message they want in there. But what would I put on there?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Like, I'm excited to put like lots of information, like records of, records of what Earth is like and we're gonna 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, like various artworks that people can put on there. So we're actually, yeah, we're drawing ideas from various places. One of them, one cool-ish scientific payload. Did you ever see this fruit fly that Google or there was a startup, they cut, they sliced the brain of a fruit fly?

• 18:56Molly O'Shea?

  The brain, yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we'll put a digital copy of that, like this fruit fly thing and like-

• 19:01Molly O'Shea?

  Whoever finds this is gonna be like, humans are tiny.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like, how the hell did they know this?

• 19:09Molly O'Shea?

  That's awesome. All right, so I do have to address this because every time, we've done plenty of hot takes now. We did one at the New York Stock Exchange. We did one in Paris at the Raze AI Summit. So I have to ask you now, what is your hottest take?

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Every time I do a hot take with you, I get in trouble.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Because usually, last time we did it, I said, you should buy SpaceX stock. And then Elon retweeted it and then-

• 19:35Molly O'Shea?

  But you were right.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  I was totally right. I was 100% right.

• 19:39Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And then what was my hottest take? Let's stick on the theme. So Elon reposted that they're gonna be worth $100 trillion in 10 years. I think they might be worth more than $100 trillion in 10 years.

• 19:53Molly O'Shea?

  You do?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:54Molly O'Shea?

  If all goes to plan and there's no world war, you believe?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  That's my hottest take.

• 19:59Molly O'Shea?

  SpaceX will be worth more than $100 trillion.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 20:02Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, well, that'll be good for business.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:07Molly O'Shea?

  What would make that up though? So like, break that down. How do you think about it?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  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, all of, you know, the rate of, the rate of growth will increase a lot once Optimus is producing Optimus's. It's a bit like what's happening now with the recursive self-improvement, but for the physical world.

• 20:41Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think Tesla will merge with SpaceX, which will help with that?

• 20:45Speaker 01

  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 gonna say the price wasn't fair.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  So at the moment, yeah, at the moment, it's, you're not gonna see too many announcements, but I think there's a Roadster announcement tonight. But beyond that, I don't think you're gonna 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.

• 21:14Molly O'Shea?

  I know this will come out after the Roadster announcement, but what's your prediction?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  What I've heard is they have these cold gas thrusters 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, which gives you absurd acceleration and cornering and everything else. And also, I think, I think there's, I think-

• 21:41Molly O'Shea?

  Lift?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Lift, yeah. I actually think you can get lift on these things.

• 21:45Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my gosh.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  What do you, what do you think?

• 21:47Molly O'Shea?

  I just, I kind of thought it might be an EVTOL.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  That would be wild, but I don't think it is.

• 21:55Molly O'Shea?

  You don't think it is?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  We would know by now if it's an EVTOL.

• 21:58Molly O'Shea?

  I think you could just skip the whole car thing and just go to EVTOL, call it a roadster.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  That would be amazing. Like, that would be incredible, but I would be extremely surprised if it was an EVTOL.

• 22:09Molly O'Shea?

  Alright, stay tuned for our predictions. Oh my god. I don't know, this one, this one is a little bit more than length.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Length and girth, length and girth.

• 22:21Molly O'Shea?

  That's crazy. So what do you use this for, what?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  This is for screwing in bolts.

• 22:29Molly O'Shea?

  That's crazy. Where did you find this?

• 22:31Speaker 01

  I went to a Halloween store this morning, because I was like-

• 22:33Molly O'Shea?

  Well, that's actually pretty impressive for a Halloween store.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  I can't be sword-mogged by the rest of your guests.

• 22:39Molly O'Shea?

  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 Versel, 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.

• 23:21Molly O'Shea?

  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/sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot 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% of the AM Law 100 and over 20% of the Fortune 500. Learn more today at harvey.ai. That's harvey.ai. AI needs more than chips. It needs power, land, and infrastructure. Zone develops next-generation data center campuses,

• 24:04Molly O'Shea?

  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 Star Cloud 2. Now you want to go into-

• 24:29Speaker 01

  We'll go to the fab shop, so we can see

• 24:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a, this is a big upgrade from our last facility, so we've literally just moved in here as of like the last few days, so everything's a little bit chaotic. But we moved from this tiny office building into this lovely manufacturing space. And this area of it is, we call the fab shop. So this is where we do dirtier work, so that the cleaner work goes on in there. Dirtier work happens here, so we're talking sheet metal work, welding, and general fabrication. So we have lots of fab shop equipment here. We have MIG welding, TIG welding, laser welding.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  We have a shear for sheet metal. And right here, we have the manufacturing demonstrator for Star Cloud 3. So Star Cloud 3 is our largest platform. It's a two-ton vehicle approximately. Okay, so this is the Star Cloud 3 manufacturing demonstrator. So we wanted to get some experience building a primary structure of the scale of our Star Cloud 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.

• 26:11Molly O'Shea?

  My god.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  And-

• 26:13Molly O'Shea?

  I've not seen Starship, or I have no idea on the scale of that. But you said two of these fit in?

• 26:21Speaker 03

  So per layer, so you get two of these.

• 26:24Molly O'Shea?

  Wide, and then-

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Wide, and then 25 tall.

• 26:27Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  So yeah, from here to the ceilings of these stacked in two rows.

• 26:31Molly O'Shea?

  So right now, we're in the middle of Starship. We're inside of it.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that gives you an idea of the diameter of Starship, the fact that this can fit in there.

• 26:38Molly O'Shea?

  That's insane.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  It's an enormous vehicle.

• 26:41Molly O'Shea?

  Where, how have you guys been launching today? What are, I know you have three launches coming up as well.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  So our first launch was with Falcon 9, so Falcon 9 ride-share mission. Our upcoming launches are all with Falcon. And yeah, it's really, it's really hard to beat the, the, the benefits and the economics of ride-share when you're, when you're producing single missions like we are at the moment. The future is definitely Starship, and that's what we're gearing up for here.

• 27:13Molly O'Shea?

  What's the process like for booking a ride?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  So booking ride-share is unbelievably easy. So it was actually the, basically the first thing we did as a company was we booked the launch for Star Cloud 1.

• 27:24Molly O'Shea?

  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?

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we, we booked about, yeah, 21 months in advance. And the process, the initial booking is, you can pay for it with a credit card. You can get a confirmation straight away.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  You could.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  You could.

• 27:46Molly O'Shea?

  Good.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Ride-share is, Falcon 9 ride-share is going away though. So these were the rosy days when it was much easier to get a single payload launched. So we're in a transitionary period at the moment, where Falcon 9 is being wound down and Starship has yet to be wound up. So we're definitely in a crunch time at the moment when it comes to launch.

• 28:10Molly O'Shea?

  What is the process for that, though? Do you need insurance? What happens if it doesn't go to plan?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  So it's, insurance is relatively inexpensive for Falcon 9, because it has such a strong track record, 300 launches, consecutive launches without a failure.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  But, so you can insure the, a failure on launch, the rocket explodes, the payload doesn't separate, that kind of thing.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  It's much more difficult to insure things going wrong with the spacecraft, as it's, you know, this is the first, first spacecraft of its type to be built. So we got insurance for the, for the launch. And, 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 insuring payloads, but yeah, we'll take it case by case.

• 29:12Molly O'Shea?

  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?

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, yeah, I think just yesterday, they probably announced the first flight will be 2027. Yeah, 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, I have a lot of faith that Rocket Lab can, can get Neutron flying regularly. They've proven that they, 100 launches of Electron, so they can, they can do scale. So yeah, we're definitely rooting for them as well.

• 30:11Molly O'Shea?

  Alright, so now we're walking around here. You have a motorcycle. We're gonna go look at that.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  You can look at it if you want.

• 30:16Molly O'Shea?

  What, whose is that? What was your joke, by the way?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  I think it's Bailey's.

• 30:21Molly O'Shea?

  Does that go into space?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe. It depends how fast they go. I'm like, I'm permanently terrified that somebody's gonna kill themselves on a motorbike.

• 30:29Molly O'Shea?

  Oh no, yeah, that is a liability.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is kind of interesting. This is a, it's a half-built, zero-gravity sort of offloading rig. And so we have these runners that run in two accesses. And so the deployable Star Cloud 2 goes, runs down this. This is one half of it. So yeah, the other half would, the other half goes that side. So it's like 120-foot-long deployable.

• 30:56Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that small package you saw there extends down the length of this.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  And then on one side and then down the length of that on the other side.

• 31:06Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And the first, the first few segments of that is radiator segment. That's the radiator we've designed and fabricated in-house. As Addie was mentioning, it's, our design is way more efficient than any other. So when we launch in January, it will be about, it will 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 watt 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.

• 31:45Molly O'Shea?

  One of the big, biggest topics, and I know we talked about this with Addie, is the economics of this. You are making more economical satellites going out in space and the vehicle itself. So that's one thing. And so I'd love to break that down in the economics there and then also further drill down the difference between on land, like terrestrial data centers versus orbital.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the whole thing is actually contingent on the launch cost. 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 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 to origin backup power. 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.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  And then we need eight times less solar cells 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, internal launch costs for SpaceX of sort of $20 to $40 a kilo. So so long as they pass that launch cost through to us, at anything less than, say,

• 33:36Speaker 01

  10 times their marginal launch cost, or even more, that makes sense for us.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Right now, by the way, on Falcon 9, they charge two or three times their marginal launch cost. So it seems reasonable.

• 33:49Molly O'Shea?

  Another thing that I listened to, so I listened to a handful of your interviews. One of the other very concerning points is chips and chip failures. So how does that work into the model?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure. It's actually a super, like, relevant point. I think it's actually more relevant and pertinent than even cooling, which is, people think is the biggest challenge. We've basically solved the cooling challenge. 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 in space. And the reason we put so much time into that is if the chips have, you know, like a 10 or 20% 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've launched.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  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. And then on the chips, we have a longer burn-in period on the ground. Most chips actually fail in the first period of their life. And so if you can put them through a more rigorous burn-in.

• 35:09Molly O'Shea?

  Why is that?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's basically the infant, they call it infant mortality of the chips.

• 35:14Molly O'Shea?

  Oh no.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  I know, it sounds kind of terrible.

• 35:18Molly O'Shea?

  That's horrible.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  So what you want is to get through the infancy period and find out all those failures. 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. 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 they have a failure in the first three months.

• 35:46Molly O'Shea?

  So you have five chips up in space right now, including one each 100?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:51Molly O'Shea?

  What are they doing?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  So actually, we have, yes, we have three chips from Nvidia, two from ARM, and we also have some CPUs from AMD on StarCloud 1. 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 Karpathy. We did the first, 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, we'll 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.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:27Molly O'Shea?

  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 the other parts of the economy?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's entirely dependent on the launch cost sitting $500 a kilo. So the business, as it is today, runs really, you know, economically with the current launch price. 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 a kilo or less. My expectation is that sort of, we've already seen Starship deploying its first payloads. We'll see reusability of Starship probably within a year. Or at least we'll see the capture of the upper stage. Re-flight might take a little bit longer. And then 2028 onwards, we're hoping to see SpaceX selling capacity to commercial customers.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:38Molly O'Shea?

  Congrats.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:40Molly O'Shea?

  Well, if the goal on Earth is to get to a 1 gigawatt facility, a 5 gigawatt facility, what is realistic for space and what does that look like in mass?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  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 FCC for a constellation of 88,000 of those.

• 39:36Molly O'Shea?

  That's crazy.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and that's just the first 88,000.

• 39:40Molly O'Shea?

  That's the first 88,000.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  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 cis lunar, MEO, beyond GEO, and to the Lagrange points. And we can, yeah, essentially, if you want to scale much more compute, then you really need to do it in space.

• 40:07Molly O'Shea?

  So will we have access to sunlight on Earth if we have so many solar panels up?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yes. And the reason is.

• 40:17Molly O'Shea?

  Because I saw, was it StarCloud 3? It's four square kilometers in orbit? What is that?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yes. 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, they're flying over the poles. So if this is the sun is, is here and this is Earth, Earth spinning on its axis, they, they fly over the poles like this. And so the, yeah, 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.

• 40:54Molly O'Shea?

  The more you know.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  The more you know.

• 40:55Molly O'Shea?

  Science. So Philip, we're back at the vibe table, and we're about to do some testing. Do you want to explain this?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  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, in launch. But also, they don't want any satellite to resonate at a certain frequency, which throws the whole stack off. And so the point of the vibe table 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, we make sure nothing flies off and we also make sure that we don't have resonance at a certain frequency.

• 41:38Molly O'Shea?

  How long do you run it for?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  It depends on the test, but the launch environment itself is about seven minutes. And so there are some tests we would, we would run for a few minutes. Most tests we run for a shorter period, especially what they call the sort of.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, like random vibe we run a bit longer, but there's the shock test we run for sure.

• 41:58Molly O'Shea?

  Have you ever?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Sat on a vibe table? I've never sat on that, I have to say. Yeah.

• 42:08Molly O'Shea?

  I've touched them before, but.

• 42:12Molly O'Shea?

  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.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:23Molly O'Shea?

  To test the drones with and they would fly them in front of it and see if anything would, you know, get fragile or break, if there were any like fractures. And it ended up just seeing me walking through RC fans. Which is, I think they go like eighty miles an hour.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 42:41Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Crazy. Oh, there you go.

• 42:44Molly O'Shea?

  Oh.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  So this is a very low frequency test. We're doing it as low frequency mainly so that you can see what it looks like when it moves. But um, the, when it moves faster, basically you won't be able to see it moving. That's if they're moving at least fifty hertz, so fifty times back and forth per second. Um, and this is basically a huge solenoid, so a huge magnet that's pulling this thing in and out.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically speeding up now. Yeah.

• 43:14Molly O'Shea?

  So we walk in?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we're good.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  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 two and all of our future vehicles. Um, 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 cooling system. So that's what the accumulator does. It's uh, it allows for that thermal expansion of the fluid. Um, to manage the pressure inside the cooling system. Um, and that's what we have on the table right now is our, the accumulator for Star Cloud two. Yep.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  We get, yeah, go for it.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. There you go.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  So.

• 44:13Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god. That's crazy.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  This is, right now the test is doing is what's called a sine sweep. It's where we're gonna 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. Uh, as it gets faster and faster, it, it won't really be able to see the movement of it.

• 44:44Molly O'Shea?

  What is?

• 44:46Molly O'Shea?

  The worst thing that a vibe table has done?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  The worst thing that a vibe table, well?

• 44:51Molly O'Shea?

  Has a vibe table like ever like as a magnet like shot out or anything?

• 44:56Speaker 01

  No, the, the actual vibe tables themselves are pretty safe. The worst thing that can happen with a vibe table is whatever you're testing can uh, explode. So for example, underneath Star Cloud two, we have this um, xenon tank for the thrusters. Um, and if the xenon tank explodes, it's about half the explosive power of a hand grenade.

• 45:18Molly O'Shea?

  Great, that's awesome. That's really good to know.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:21Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  That's why we're not doing that test today. So.

• 45:23Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, so does everyone leave the building when you test that?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  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 test up, we have to, everybody has to leave the building.

• 45:44Molly O'Shea?

  I doubt the toy manufacturer that has storage across the street has any idea what's going on in here.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  They have no idea.

• 45:53Molly O'Shea?

  They have no idea.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  But they are far enough away that we know that uh, they're, they're good, they're safe.

• 45:59Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Molly O'Shea?

  Why isn't everyone running out?

• 46:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  That's first mode. Uh, okay, okay. So what they're testing for is this first mode. It's the first um, frequency at which it's resonating. And when you can hear it making this clicking sound, that means we've hit the, the first mode of, of this thing here. Um, what they, what SpaceX requires is that you don't have a first mode below a certain frequency. I think it's around forty hertz.

• 46:32Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  So it cannot resonate at anything less than forty times a second. And the reason for that is, let's say it would resonate at like twice a second, then the whole thing's gonna go like this back and forth. And that will move all the other payloads in the stack.

• 46:45Molly O'Shea?

  That's a really good point. So what is the process to get your space prop or any, any kind of components up into space tested? To make sure that it's like viable for Falcon nine or Starship?

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as I mentioned, booking is just put your credit card down, but then that kicks off a whole long process. Where uh, both regulatory, we have to file with the FCC uh, for the orbit and for the spectrum we're gonna 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 gonna destroy any other spacecraft on the stack. So if you book a fully dedicated Falcon nine, the requirements are less stringent than if you're booking a rideshare. Because they need to make sure you're not gonna move the whole stack or you're not gonna have things flying off and uh, killing other spacecraft.

• 47:34Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:36Molly O'Shea?

  So how do they actually verify your, like your approvals or like your checklists?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  We have to do vibe and then we send them the vibe reports uh, after we've done the vibe testing.

• 47:46Molly O'Shea?

  Has anybody ever?

• 47:49Molly O'Shea?

  Lied?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 47:58Molly O'Shea?

  I don't know why you would do that, unless you're an op.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Unless you're an op.

• 48:01Molly O'Shea?

  Unless you're an op.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 48:04Molly O'Shea?

  Jeez, I think we just uncovered something. Um, okay, cool. How good is AI at real professional work? Mercur'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 mercor.com/apeX. Today's episode is sponsored by V C X by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech. 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.

• 48:46Molly O'Shea?

  Agents can monitor markets, execute trading strategies and manage your cash across stocks, bonds, options, crypto and more. Wanna buy at market close and sell the next day is open? Just tell your agent. Automate your investing at public.com. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash sorcery. Alright, so we're walking on through to the laser lab. How many people work at Star Cloud?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Right now it's thirty people at Star Cloud.

• 49:26Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, that's it?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  That's it, yeah, yeah.

• 49:28Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Thirty, only two non-engineers. Um, and so we'll probably have fifty by the end of the year, maybe a hundred by the end of next year. But we very deliberately, oh, there's Camilla, very deliberately keep the team extremely lean. Um, as I say, we have like the most kick-ass engineering team on planet Earth. Uh, this will become a, a full like laser lab, so we'll use this for cutting and welding of um, aluminum and things. We just wanna show you the uh, we have a little demo for you.

• 49:58Molly O'Shea?

  Make Things Go Zap?

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:01Molly O'Shea?

  Hi.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  This is Camilla, who's a.

• 50:03Molly O'Shea?

  Do we wanna give you a mic and you can talk through it or do you wanna talk?

• 50:08Speaker 01

  There you go, you can, you can, you can have a little word.

• 50:11Molly O'Shea?

  Demo.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  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 thirty dial 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'll run a quick demo here.

• 50:43Molly O'Shea?

  Always get nervous.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  If you wanna get the camera in there, you can probably.

• 50:45Molly O'Shea?

  Here, you can go in there, bro.

• 50:49Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Alright, ready, go.

• 50:52Molly O'Shea?

  Fire.

• 50:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can't see it, it's too, the reflection.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  You'll, you'll see it here.

• 51:28Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god! It's so cute!

• 51:32Speaker 01

  It's a little present for you.

• 51:33Molly O'Shea?

  That's awesome!

• 51:36Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god!

• 51:38Speaker 06

  Stuff like this helps a lot to move quickly. It gives a lot of flexibility. And this is just the start. We're gonna get a much larger professional machines.

• 51:45Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, is this your favorite tool?

• 51:48Speaker 06

  One of them.

• 51:48Molly O'Shea?

  One of them?

• 51:50Speaker 06

  The next one's gonna be my favorite.

• 51:52Molly O'Shea?

  What is it?

• 51:53Speaker 06

  It's gonna be an Amada Fiber Laser Cutter. So that we can fit material that's up to, I believe, 5 by 10 feet. So it's a professional-grade laser cutter. So it's gonna be significantly more capable than this one is.

• 52:07Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 52:10Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you!

• 52:11Speaker 01

  And as I understand, you yourself-

• 52:15Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, really? Okay, I gotta keep it.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  I can take it if you want me to put it in my pocket.

• 52:19Molly O'Shea?

  Here, I'll give it to Brett.

• 52:22Molly O'Shea?

  Alright, so we walked through...

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Fab shop, the assembly area.

• 52:27Molly O'Shea?

  Fab shop, assembly area, laser.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  We've got, uh, 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?

• 52:41Molly O'Shea?

  I made a very bold claim, but I did learn how to weld in college.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  I think we should put this to the test.

• 52:48Molly O'Shea?

  I'm down to try.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  I think your viewers would find this very exciting.

• 52:52Molly O'Shea?

  I am down to try. I was called a prodigy, so we'll see. Still the case.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  We'll find out, we'll find out. So we have some welding materials back here. Shall we get you in a-

• 53:03Molly O'Shea?

  Sure, do I have to like, should I change everything?

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you need to change.

• 53:07Molly O'Shea?

  Then I'll change. Alright, we've now advanced. We're now with Miguel, the Engineering Operations Lead here at Star Cloud. What are you gonna show us today and what's your background?

• 53:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we're gonna deliver a welding, just traditional welding. We do a lot of laser welding here at Star Cloud, 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 gonna 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 US Army.

• 53:53Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god!

• 53:54Speaker 06

  Deploying overseas.

• 53:55Molly O'Shea?

  How did you get into welding?

• 53:57Speaker 06

  Uh, 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.

• 54:21Molly O'Shea?

  It's very satisfying.

• 54:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

• 54:24Molly O'Shea?

  A little addicting?

• 54:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a lot of fun, a lot of fun.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  That sounds like you. You posted recently on X. Somebody was like, "America needs more welders", and you're like posting shit about how good you are at welding. So now we're gonna find out, now we're gonna find out.

• 54:35Molly O'Shea?

  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 metalwork, woodwork, glassblowing.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 55:04Molly O'Shea?

  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, you might as well be doing that, but at trade school. So like, I don't really understand that, but it was so much fun. And I was called a prodigy, so...

• 55:23Speaker 06

  We will see.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  We're gonna find out.

• 55:25Speaker 06

  So what we're gonna do is, we're gonna give you a little bit of PPE, so the sparks can burn you. So just put this jacket on. And we're gonna give you some-

• 55:33Molly O'Shea?

  Should I tie my hair back?

• 55:35Speaker 06

  If you keep it in the jacket, you might be fine. As long as it's behind you, you're fine. And make sure that you button at least a couple of the buttons.

• 55:43Molly O'Shea?

  I'll button it.

• 55:44Speaker 06

  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, or you should be perfectly fine.

• 55:52Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, I remember we weren't allowed to wear any polyester.

• 55:54Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  Perfect. And then you can do your sleeves as well.

• 56:06Molly O'Shea?

  You haven't done any of this? Why?

• 56:10Speaker 06

  Crazy guy, he's never here. Traveling the world.

• 56:13Molly O'Shea?

  That's true, he's always on stage somewhere. Why aren't you in the shop?

• 56:17Speaker 06

  So we'll have you put this on first. So the way that 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.

• 56:30Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 56:31Speaker 06

  So you don't have to worry about doing anything. All you have to do is put it on, crank this down.

• 56:34Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, let me-

• 56:35Speaker 06

  And you'll be ready to go.

• 56:36Molly O'Shea?

  Should I do this one for them?

• 56:38Speaker 06

  I'm gonna do the same, I'm gonna put on some PPE.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Do you have like any kind of glass? I'm gonna be quite far back.

• 56:48Speaker 06

  You can use the same one right there.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  This one?

• 56:50Speaker 06

  Yep, you can put that on.

• 56:50Molly O'Shea?

  Who is she?

• 57:14Speaker 06

  Very nice.

• 57:15Molly O'Shea?

  That one, my hand skipped a little bit.

• 57:16Speaker 06

  Yep, that's fine, still counts. We can do one more if you want.

• 57:20Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, one more!

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Alright, last one, this is one that counts.

• 57:23Molly O'Shea?

  Alright.

• 57:24Speaker 06

  Stay nice and tight.

• 57:33Speaker 06

  Closer.

• 57:36Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 57:49Speaker 06

  Alright, you're hired.

• 57:50Molly O'Shea?

  Not bad!

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Damn!

• 57:52Molly O'Shea?

  Let's go!

• 57:53Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 57:54Molly O'Shea?

  "America needs welders."

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Nice job.

• 57:58Molly O'Shea?

  Cool, thank you, Miguel.

• 57:59Speaker 06

  You're very welcome.

• 57:59Molly O'Shea?

  This was so much fun!

• 58:03Molly O'Shea?

  That's my real reaction.

• 58:10Molly O'Shea?

  So on a scale of 1 to 10, Mike, what are we talking about here?

• 58:13Speaker 06

  I'll say a 5.

• 58:14Molly O'Shea?

  Wow! That's amazing!

• 58:18Speaker 06

  I've been welding for 10 years and don't do a job like that.

• 58:20Molly O'Shea?

  Damn! That's pretty good!

• 58:22Speaker 06

  You must pay attention and take good instructions.

• 58:25Molly O'Shea?

  That's right, we do-

• 58:26Speaker 01

  I am.

• 58:28Molly O'Shea?

  That's great.

• 58:31Molly O'Shea?

  Cool, thank you.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  They just lifted the satellite. I don't know if you wanna, maybe it's too late to get footage of that, but if you want, we just-

• 58:38Molly O'Shea?

  Um, yeah, let's go over there. So we just did the welding and-

• 58:41Speaker 01

  You crushed it.

• 58:42Molly O'Shea?

  I'm a 5. Out of 10?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  He didn't say out of 10, it could be out of 5.

• 58:47Molly O'Shea?

  He did say out of 10.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Did he?

• 58:49Molly O'Shea?

  Yes!

• 58:49Speaker 01

  I thought he said you're a solid 5.

• 58:50Molly O'Shea?

  No, he said you're a solid 5 out of 10.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Did he? Okay, okay, okay.

• 58:53Molly O'Shea?

  It's like, damn, that's pretty good!

• 58:58Molly O'Shea?

  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 2?

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so actually, most people that you can see are both engineering and we have all the engineers make sure that they 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 the wires and testing stuff. We also have a technician team, that was Miguel. We got four technicians, some more coming on soon. Maybe five now, I don't wanna get it wrong.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  And their job is like welding and fabrication, making, actually producing the satellite. So yeah, Miguel's team, we, the whole computer module here is an aluminum box that they in-house produced and fabricated.

• 59:56Molly O'Shea?

  And I am contributing to that.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  And you are contributing a huge amount.

• 1:00:01Molly O'Shea?

  Whenever you need me, let me know, I can come on.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  For your listeners, it is official, you have now done more welding at Star Cloud than I have.

• 1:00:08Molly O'Shea?

  Wow!

• 1:00:10Molly O'Shea?

  You gotta really visit Miguel, I think he's waiting for you to-

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:14Molly O'Shea?

  Put in some work. You're not doing enough.

• 1:00:18Molly O'Shea?

  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.

• 1:00:28Speaker 06

  So I'm the Engineering Manager here at Star Cloud. And what we're doing right now is a leak check of the prop system. So right now, we have a fully-fueled electric-

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  ...pulsion 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.

• 1:00:44Molly O'Shea?

  How did you come here? How did you get to Star Cloud?

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  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 in like biotech and consumer product design. Those didn't really stick. 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 Star Cloud really stuck out. Back then, they had a different name.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  And got in contact with Fabros super early on, and the rest is history.

• 1:01:17Molly O'Shea?

  What's your favorite thing about Philip?

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  You can't do that. You can't do that.

• 1:01:26Molly O'Shea?

  What do you hate about him? Yeah, what do you hate about him? What's your least favorite? We don't say hate. What's your biggest challenge with Philip over here? Does he not give you enough attention? What's going on?

• 1:01:38Molly O'Shea?

  Let's work this out on camera.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  It's a two-sided coin or whatever, but like the office is very busy with tours and things like that all the time.

• 1:01:47Molly O'Shea?

  We gotta go.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:01:49Molly O'Shea?

  The interview's over. The interview's over. He's like, I have to work. Stop interrupting me.

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  That was the politest way to tell you to fuck off.

• 1:01:55Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God. Damn, Bailey, give me the mic.

• 1:02:00Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, that's funny. Okay, so what are you most looking forward to? What is your favorite part of the process?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  I think the next thing I'm looking forward to most is obviously the launch, for sure. I'm gonna 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 was 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. Bailey was responsible for designing, fabricating the radiators. And also Bailey is responsible for this satellite being here.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  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 and basically built that bus by scratch, from scratch, so.

• 1:03:01Molly O'Shea?

  Damn.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  It was fun.

• 1:03:02Molly O'Shea?

  Where'd you build it?

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  In Colorado, in our bus provider's office.

• 1:03:06Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God. All right, so we're just leaving the main facility. We're now going over here.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna go to...

• 1:03:12Molly O'Shea?

  You're buying up the entire...

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  We're building a bit of a campus here.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  This is definitely the place where you need to be to build AI satellites, basically, SI satellites.

• 1:03:22Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  So we've got now this middle section that we are, we have now. Where 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 Star Cloud 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 Star Cloud 3 that we need to test, test the mechanisms on. But also to manufacture something like 88,000, you know, we're gonna need a way bigger facility.

• 1:03:56Molly O'Shea?

  I just think Brett's gonna trip. I'm so sorry.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  It's fine, it's fine.

• 1:04:01Molly O'Shea?

  To manufacture 88,000, okay?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  To manufacture 88,000, we're gonna need a whole bunch more space.

• 1:04:07Molly O'Shea?

  So how many do you think you'll be able to produce a day?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  So we'll be up to 100 a week from what we've got here.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  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 100,000 square foot that we can fit out for manufacturing. So we're gonna remove this wall, and we'll remove that wall, and then that enables us to...

• 1:04:32Molly O'Shea?

  This is huge.

• 1:04:35Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be quite a sight to behold when this is up and running.

• 1:04:39Molly O'Shea?

  You should throw a Halloween party in here with this.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. We're gonna do a, we'll do an opening party sometime soon, so you're very much welcome.

• 1:04:50Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  I know you're on the road all the time, so.

• 1:04:53Molly O'Shea?

  You never know where I land, so.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Who knows? Maybe Woodinville in three weeks.

• 1:04:59Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so in here, it's gonna look much different than the previous facility.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  It'll look pretty similar, actually, to the previous facility.

• 1:05:06Molly O'Shea?

  It'll look the same?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Except with a manufacturing line, like a proper... In the end state, we want it to be like an auto manufacturing line. So if you, when you see a Tesla factory, you see cars going down a line, it'll be exactly like that, except with Star Cloud 3 chassis going down the line, with various things being added.

• 1:05:23Molly O'Shea?

  How do, how, okay, so this is crazy question. How does Star Cloud 3 get to Starship?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  We load them on the back of a truck and then drive them down the motorway.

• 1:05:39Molly O'Shea?

  That's it?

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  That's it, yeah. It's very similar to the way, 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.

• 1:05:52Molly O'Shea?

  Damn. Okay, wow. All right, so one thing we haven't talked about yet is Star Cloud has raised $450 million in total. What are you using the money for?

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:04Molly O'Shea?

  How is the capital being utilized?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  A bunch of it's going to fitting out these places and then hiring and materials and everything else.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're making about a million dollars a week on interest right now.

• 1:06:29Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  A million dollars a month, sorry, in interest.

• 1:06:33Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  But soon we'll be spending...

• 1:06:35Molly O'Shea?

  You use Brex as a really good treasury product.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  We do use Brex, actually, and they do have a great treasury product, so there you go.

• 1:06:42Molly O'Shea?

  I know, I get a good interest on that.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  There you go, yeah.

• 1:06:46Molly O'Shea?

  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?

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's a great point and one we think a lot about.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  It's actually a lot harder to shoot down a satellite than it is to, for example, blow up a data center in Virginia,

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  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, we have a pretty good case study, actually, from the Starlink satellites. So Starlink is being used in Ukraine and also Starshield. 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 of satellites, we kind of, we can kind of see the tactics people are using already on Starship, on, sorry, 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 it's, yeah, anything that approaches a satellite would be very visible.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  So anything bigger than one inch cube, you could track in space. And so we would, you know, 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 kind of can't do, and that would be considered an act of war on the US. 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.

• 1:08:43Molly O'Shea?

  So as we just finished walking through the HQ, seeing the tracking of Star Cloud 1, the development of Star Cloud 2, and some of the early innings of Star Cloud 3, what are you most looking forward to in the next 12 months?

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Definitely the thing I'm most looking forward to is the launch of Star Cloud 2. So that's gonna happen in January, and it's gonna be a huge proof point with the radiators and everything else we've designed in there.

• 1:09:06Molly O'Shea?

  Exciting. Well, thank you so much, Philip.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for coming.

• 1:09:09Molly O'Shea?

  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.