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.
00:07:00 · Molly O'Shea, Philip Johnston
[00:07:00] S0: It's a great point because Starcloud, you guys went from founding to in orbit in twenty one months. [00:07:06] S1: Yeah. Which is a record. I think the fastest anybody did that before us was four years. And that was basically because Adi and Ezra built the satellite by hand. Yeah. We'll speak with Adi in a minute. But [00:07:16] S0: 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? [00:07:37] S1: 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. 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. Yeah, so about half our team actually formerly worked at SpaceX. The other half were the hyperscalers, so we have AWS and Azure down the road. So for doing data centers in space, this is literally the best place in the world you could be. [00:08:17] S0: Okay. So we're also joined by another co founder of Starcloud, Adi. So Adi, tell us a little bit about your background and how did you end up here?
00:08:17 · Molly O'Shea, Adi Oltean
[00:08:17] S0: Okay. So we're also joined by another co founder of Starcloud, Adi. So Adi, tell us a little bit about your background and how did you end up here? [00:08:26] S3: 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 Yeah. I help pull that. Before Star... 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 Zacchaeus models 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 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. And then later this year, part of the same GTC keynote in in San Jose just introduced Space one, which is one... The very first GPU designed to work in space. [00:09:39] S0: Damn. Yeah. Philip was telling me you've been mentioned in GTC talks multiple times. [00:09:44] S3: Not me personally, but our team. Yes. [00:09:47] S0: That's incredible. [00:09:48] S3: I helped build the demo. [00:09:49] S0: Yeah. So we're standing in front of Starcloud 2. Do you wanna give us a little rundown on it?
00:09:49 · Molly O'Shea, Adi Oltean, Philip Johnston
[00:09:49] S0: Yeah. So we're standing in front of Starcloud 2. Do you wanna give us a little rundown on it? [00:09:54] S3: Yeah. So people are busy at the moment. They are about to fire the HDRM, which is essentially a latch that will deploy the solar panels on each side of the spacecraft. And if you hear a loud pop, that's it. So we are testing the satellite actively. We are testing various systems. [00:10:15] S1: There you go. As long I as know. I was was like, something's been [00:10:21] S3: Maybe not as climactic as just 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 we can get kilowatts of power to all our compete. [00:10:42] S0: 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? [00:10:54] S3: 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 which is kind of our secret sauce, if you will, another HDRM filing. And, yeah, we try to integrate as much as possible in house. [00:11:27] S0: What's been the biggest technical challenge coming over to Starcloud?