00:27:19 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:27:19] S0: And [00:27:21] S1: so all like my intuition for how these things work or like what matters, what doesn't matter, it's developing like it's in a state of development, which by the way is very fun because I know I I have experienced what it feels like to go from the searching and the striving to understand to demonstrating the understanding to then feeling like my understanding is at the forefront of what the thing is to kind of the high watermark, which is like my understanding and the things that I'm building will then define the forefront. Right? So that's kind of that we're definitely... I I wouldn't, you know, be so bold as to say that [00:28:05] S0: we're there right now. But you can see the trajectory.
00:28:07 · Baiju Bhatt
[00:28:07] S1: Yeah. But it's like the understanding the intuition is developing and developing and developing. So we have recently announced that we're pursuing a plan to build orbital data centers as well. And I think it's kind of interesting to play it through that lens. So my idea when I started Aetherflux was there's going to be an energy company that needs to be built in space. And more specifically, the thought was if you imagine low earth orbit as a platform for commerce, like a platform for global distribution, What are the verticals of the economy that exist on this global distribution platform? And as I saw it, I... You know, this is like, a caricature, but still a paraphrasing of its earth imaging, its defense stuff, it's telecommunications, and more recently, it's internet. That's not all that's going to exist in lower earth orbit. Like there will be other industries that natively exist. What are what is that next one where from a foundational perspective, I think the component technology is there and it's more you're building something that's the sum of parts that's more valuable than the sum of the parts as opposed to like inventing new things along the way. I'm like, well, this is my intuition says that the energy industry is both ready because photovoltaics are so cheap. And also there's going to be a market need for this because there's an energy crunch, from AI of the wave of which which is continuing to build as as I see it. Right? Like, what last year might have felt like, you know, it's sort of maybe crescendoing. In in hindsight, that's not think it's crescendoing. No. I don't... In hindsight, that's definitely not right. Now where we are right now, like, remains to be seen. Intuitively, to me, it feels like it's gaining momentum. I don't think that's a hot take, by the way. No. But the idea was we wanted to build a power company in space. And I asked the question, like, how would I do such a thing? Like, what's the pattern to pattern match there? Yeah. And the and the version I kinda settled on was space is very expensive in order to be able to compete with things commercially on the ground. Right?
00:30:23 · Baiju Bhatt
You'd have to get to some pretty substantial scale where if you get to substantial enough scale, then you can start down costing the cost of your service because you're not buying one offs, you're making them and you're making them in larger quantities, you're getting economies of scale. How do you do that? My thesis was for energy and power distribution from space, find something that's useful that is oriented towards government applications because that's the place where a lot of space technologies have like sort of incubated for a couple of years, matured, and then become more useful for commercial applications. So GPS is an example of this. And so that's kind of the path that we were on. And speaking to like the building of the intuition, the light bulb went off for me sometime in the sort of summer, maybe a little earlier than that of this past year, because we were talking about like, what can you do if you collect a lot of power in orbit and you beam it down? Well, it's... You know, the initial applications for this, I think, are gonna be in places where there's not a power grid. So contested environments, remote environments, where you get the benefit of being able to plug into a power grid with a small little receiver on the ground. Cool. And that... That's something that will be useful for the DOD applications, excuse me, department of war, scale from that. And then eventually, the satellites get bigger and the amount of power that you produce gets much bigger, then you can start applying this for industrial applications like AI. AI, like, doesn't... Don't people want energy for data centers? Like, why don't you beam power down to data centers? As a conversation I kept having, I was like, well, you know, it could be useful for that application. However, by the nature of power transmission, you end up dissipating a decent bit of the power, going electrical to optical out of the satellites and then reconverting optical to electrical on the ground. And so maybe in the future it'll be useful for those applications, but I wouldn't say that I necessarily was like, yeah, that's gonna be the place where it works immediately. Then the intuition of going through and like, you know, doing design reviews for like this power beaming stuff and like really thinking through how this works.
00:32:50 · Baiju Bhatt, Ty Morse
It was in a conversation with a friend that the light bulb kind of went off where like, actually, what if you just took the chips rather than collecting the power in space? So you have like photons that hit the solar panels, turn it into electricity. The electricity goes into a, you know, a laser system that turns it back into light, then you point that light down to the ground, use, you know, effectively solar panels to reconvert that into electricity, and then you plug that into the data center. So a [00:33:22] S0: bunch of process steps that you can just eliminate entirely. [00:33:25] S1: Yeah. Well, what if you just deleted all of [00:33:26] S0: it? Yeah.
00:33:27 · Baiju Bhatt
[00:33:27] S1: And you took the chips and you moved them right next to the receiver. It's like, well, no. Why don't you move them right next to the satellite? Next to the laser, like, just get rid of the laser. What if you put the solar panels? This was the original kind of, like, intuitive concept. What if you put the solar panels and you put the GPUs on the backs of the solar panels? Like, why... That's not actually the the architecture that I think you would go with for this because because of other constraints. But as a thought experiment, like, isn't that the most direct marriaging of the application, and the sort of like energy provider for that application? And then as I started doing more and more thinking about, for example, the thermodynamics of this, the radiation shielding, etcetera, etcetera, it became clear that it was going to be hard, but there weren't any obvious showstoppers. Moreover, by actually putting the thing that's consuming the power right next to the power generation, it's actually kind of a magical architecture. Right? Because the real benefit of this is going to be, as we look out over the next handful of years, the time it takes to bring a new data center online, it's like five to eight years. Like there's a real crunch here, right? This has the potential to be a massive accelerant in that in that you can take the chips of which there's gonna be an overabundance of at some point. I think I tend to agree with you a lot on that. Imagine a factory where, you know, like a truck full of chips comes in on one side, takes a week, couple of weeks, month, let's say a couple of months to turn those chips, integrate them with the solar panels, build satellites out of them, build stacks of these things.
00:35:19 · Ty Morse, Baiju Bhatt
[00:35:19] S0: Rent a Falcon and ship them up? Exactly. [00:35:22] S1: Yeah. And then as soon as they're in orbit effectively, they're online. Right? [00:35:27] S0: And then [00:35:28] S1: you would also like to work [00:35:29] S0: together with lasers. [00:35:30] S1: Yeah. Yeah. So that's where the laser technology is gonna, I think, be a very important reused sort of core component that ties these two different applications together. [00:35:43] S0: Yeah. I think one of the biggest, like, critiques was just having, like, a massive megastructure in space and, you know, slight, like, I don't know, like variations or anything could just destroy the entire thing. And if you just have, like, small satellites, they're all network together with lasers, there's not really any issue. [00:35:58] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I would love to live in a world where these, like, massive megastructures exist in space. There's there's probably a way of engineering them. It's just not terribly economically feasible in '26. At least right now. Not right now. I wanna come back to something. Okay. And I wanna share a little wisdom with you, young Padawan. Okay. This is coming back to that rendering of Brian Chesky. [00:36:25] S0: The way asterisk this? That was, like, three years ago. We've gotten a little bit better, Baiju. Thank you. [00:36:30] S1: Now go on. The way if you if you really want to show reverence and respect for somebody. Right? [00:36:36] S0: Right. [00:36:36] S1: Take the example of what I've done with this mural here [00:36:39] S0: No. It's for