00:00:00 · Molly O'Shea, Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden
[00:00:00] S0: We're with Philip Johnston, the CEO, and we're gonna go through the $2,000,000,000 company and what they're building behind us. [00:00:07] S1: Well, that's a satellite we launched in November last year with the first NVIDIA h one hundreds on board. [00:00:11] S0: Starcloud one, separation confirmed. [00:00:13] S1: They told us it would cost 75,000,000 to a $100,000,000 to do Starcloud one. We did it for about $2,500,000. 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. [00:00:30] S2: It's around two tons fully loaded, 235 kilowatts, and we can deploy up to 50 of them per Starship launch. Do you think [00:00:37] S0: Tesla will merge with SpaceX? [00:00:39] S1: This isn't a hot take. This is just a fact. SpaceX is going to buy Tesla. [00:00:53] S0: We're here at Starcloud in the Seattle region. Not gonna disclose the exact location because it's a secret, right, Philip? [00:01:00] S2: Top secret. [00:01:00] S0: Top secret, okay? We're with Philip Johnston, the CEO, and we're gonna go through the $2,000,000,000 company and what they're building behind us.
00:01:00 · Molly O'Shea, Philip Johnston
[00:01:00] S0: Top secret, okay? We're with Philip Johnston, the CEO, and we're gonna go through the $2,000,000,000 company and what they're building behind us. [00:01:10] S1: So welcome to Starcloud. On the screen, we actually have the location of Starcloud one. So that's a satellite we launched in November last year with the first NVIDIA H100s onboard. This little green area is everything that it's 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. [00:01:42] S0: And before we walked over here, it was down here. Something special happened over here. [00:01:48] S1: 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 6AM and then showed her on the phone because I'd written a proposal on Starcloud one. [00:02:00] S0: Yeah. [00:02:01] S1: So, yeah. It's cute. Check out the [00:02:03] S0: post if you haven't yet. Okay. All right. So we're going to walk through the facility. Just give us a sense of what we'll be looking at, what stages of development. Are we going to see Starcloud 1Starcloud 2maybe? Yeah. Starcloud 3anywhere close?
00:02:17 · Philip Johnston
[00:02:17] S1: Yeah, well, so Starcloud one is launched. Starcloud two we have in the assembly facility. As I say, it's... We are... This is midway through move in, 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 rolled it up a mock up of the chassis of Starcloud three 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're bringing online next year. Awesome. Cool. Cool. This is the, main assembly area for Starcloud two, and this is the satellite in the background. You can see Starcloud two. You can see on the top the 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 actually had... I'm gonna 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. Oh, no. Yeah. So... And it's about $1,500,000 for a new Vide table. So we actually bought this secondhand broken Vide table for $200, 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. Alright.
00:03:44 · Molly O'Shea
[00:03:44] S0: We have a new entrant on the video. So we're here with Ezra. Ezra is also a co founder. Do you wanna give a couple sentences on your background and then we'll talk about the vibe table?
00:03:53 · Ezra Feilden
[00:03:53] S2: For sure. Yeah. My name is Ezra Feilden. I'm the cofounder and CTO at Starcloud. Before Starcloud, 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 I before that, I did my PhD in materials engineering. So, yeah, we're standing in front of our vibe table, our very old, very beefing up vibe table. We had to get this on an extremely short lead time and new vibe tables are, you know, twenty six month lead time over a million dollars and that didn't work for our schedule. So the only option available to us and 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. 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. Oh, my God. 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 experts and vibe tables come and tell us that the repair is not possible. We pressed on and we got it limping along at least enough to complete our spacecraft level vibe test.
00:05:43 · Molly O'Shea, Ezra Feilden, Philip Johnston
[00:05:43] S0: So do you find this on like Facebook marketplace? Like, where do we find old vibe tables? [00:05:50] S2: Yes. It tends to be auction houses. Yeah. Surplus auction houses. When companies go out of business, they they get rid of all their assets and, yeah, that's a it's a bit of a... Yeah. There's some some diamonds in [00:06:02] S1: the rough there for sure. It's not easy to move. There's about 60 tons. [00:06:06] S0: Oh my god. [00:06:07] S2: 16 tons. [00:06:08] S1: Sorry. 16. Sorry. 16 tons. Yeah. Yeah. Is, a bit of beast. [00:06:14] S2: It's it's hefty. And, you know, to run just to to power this thing, we need a generator. So we have a very large generator outside. [00:06:22] S0: I know when I was pulling up, 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. [00:06:32] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, 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 and hustle and and basically not take no for an answer and just be incredibly scrappy. That's our superpower as a startup, I think, the ability to turn these crazy scenarios around and make a success of them. [00:07:00] S0: It's a great point because Starcloud, you guys went from founding to in orbit in twenty one months.