00:37:27 · Molly O'Shea, Philip Johnston
[00:37:27] S0: 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 out into other parts of the economy? [00:37:40] S1: Yeah. So it's entirely dependent on the launch cost hitting $500 a kilo. So the business as it is today runs really 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. Reflight might take a little bit longer. And then 2028 onwards, we're hoping to see SpaceX selling capacity to commercial customers. You know, If they don't, we also are considering other options and so we've booked on a bunch of different other launch vehicles, not just Falcon nine, but also some others. Think we announced Stoke already, we announced Firefly, and we'll announce, some others soon. [00:38:38] S0: Congrats. Well, if the goal on Earth is to get to a one gigawatt facility, a five gigawatt facility, what is realistic for space and what does that look like in mass?
00:38:38 · Molly O'Shea, Philip Johnston
[00:38:38] S0: Congrats. Well, if the goal on Earth is to get to a one gigawatt facility, a five gigawatt facility, what is realistic for space and what does that look like in mass? [00:38:50] S1: 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. In space, for a long time, we're probably not going 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 HBT queries. So the the the road map 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. [00:39:36] S0: That's crazy. [00:39:37] S1: Yeah. So... And that's just the first 88,000. So that would... Just the first 88,000. Yeah. Mean, we're not stopping there. So that that enables us to deploy the first 20 gigawatts. Mhmm. 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 cislunar, MEO, beyond GEO, and to the Lagrange points. Essentially, if you want to scale much more compute, then you really need to do it in space. [00:40:08] S0: So will we have access to sunlight on Earth if we have so many solar panels
00:40:08 · Molly O'Shea, Philip Johnston
[00:40:08] S0: So will we have access to sunlight on Earth if we have so many solar panels [00:40:13] S1: Yes. We will. And the reason is... [00:40:17] S0: Because I saw... Was it Starcloud three? It's four square kilometers in orbit? Yes. [00:40:25] S1: Yeah. Starcloud three, 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 this... If this is the sun who's is here and this is 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. [00:40:54] S0: The more you know. [00:40:55] S1: The more you know. [00:40:55] S0: Science. So, Philip, we're back at the vibe table, and we're about to do some testing. Do you wanna explain this?
00:40:55 · Molly O'Shea, Philip Johnston
[00:40:55] S0: Science. So, Philip, we're back at the vibe table, and we're about to do some testing. Do you wanna explain this? [00:41:02] S1: 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 tenets, they wanna make sure that both nothing's gonna fly off from any individual satellite in in launch, but also, they don't want any satellite to resonate at a certain frequency, throws the whole stack off. And so the point of the bike table is to put the satellite through every different frequency and amplitude that the satellite is gonna experience during launch and also this shock test so that we make sure nothing flies off, we also make sure that we don't have resonance at a certain frequency. [00:41:38] S0: How long do you run it for? [00:41:39] S1: It depends on the test, but the launch environment itself is about seven minutes, and so there are some tests we would run for a few minutes. Most tests we run for a shorter period, especially what they call the sort of... Yeah, like, random vibe we run a bit longer, but there is the shock test we run for shorter. [00:41:58] S0: Have you ever [00:42:00] S1: Sat on a vital on that? I have never sat on that, I have to say. [00:42:06] S0: Had to ask. [00:42:07] S1: I've [00:42:09] S0: touched them before, but [00:42:10] S1: Oh, yeah.
00:42:10 · Philip Johnston, Molly O'Shea
[00:42:10] S1: Oh, yeah. [00:42:12] S0: Were at Zipline, and we went into their testing room, and they had a vibe table and these like RC propeller, like RC fans to test the drones with and they would fly them in front of it and see if anything would, you know, be fragile or break, if there were any like fractures. [00:42:32] S1: And it ended up just being me walking through Farcey Man's No way. [00:42:37] S0: Which is... They're... I think they go, like, 80 miles an hour. [00:42:40] S1: Wow. Yeah. Crazy. Oh, there you go. Oh. 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 the... When when it moves faster, basically, you won't be able to see it moving. That's... They're moving at least 50 hertz, so 50 times back and forth per second. And this is basically a huge solenoid, so a huge mag... Magnet that's pulling this thing in and out. It's, yeah, basically speeding up now. So we walk in? Yeah. Yeah. We're good.
00:42:40 · Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, Molly O'Shea
[00:42:40] S1: Wow. Yeah. Crazy. Oh, there you go. Oh. 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 the... When when it moves faster, basically, you won't be able to see it moving. That's... They're moving at least 50 hertz, so 50 times back and forth per second. And this is basically a huge solenoid, so a huge mag... Magnet that's pulling this thing in and out. It's, yeah, basically speeding up now. So we walk in? Yeah. Yeah. We're good. [00:43:22] S2: 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 Starcloud two and all of our future vehicles. As the liquid heats up, it wants to expand, and so you have to have a component which allows that expansion to take place. Otherwise, you'll burst your your cooling system. So that's what the accumulator does. It's... It allows for that thermal expansion of the fluid to to manage the pressure inside the the cooling system. And that's what we have on the table right now is our... The accumulator for Starcloud two. Yep. We get... Yeah. Go for it. [00:44:03] S1: Yeah. There you go. So... [00:44:13] S0: Oh my god.