00:16:51 · Saurav Shroff
[00:16:51] S1: So first of all, I don't wanna understate the difficulty. Like there's a phrase, it's not rocket science, and that phrase exists for a reason because rocket science... Well, rocket science isn't actually that hard, but rocket engineering and manufacturing is extremely challenging. I would say it's like, it's less math and more logic, and you said, did you math the logic? There wasn't a lot of math, there was mostly logic. I mean, a little bit of math, like, okay, what would rocket look like? How big would it be? Where would you launch it from? These types of questions, but it's mostly logic, like, the the logic is like, okay, super intelligence is being made. You could make a bet that it doesn't need to scale, in which case we have no problems, right? We don't need to scale, the ground is sufficient, Deploy all your data centers on the ground. Every sappy. Okay. That that would be one bet. That doesn't really seem very likely. In the more likely case, where we do need to scale, the ground doesn't work, space becomes better, And then if you just go through the logic of what happens in that scenario, which seems to me like the likely scenario, it's quite grim. It's like, you have this like sort of standoffish market with like massive companies, and I'm not against big companies, okay, I'm not socialist, but I am against like, futures where technologies are... Don't... Aren't... Like important technologies aren't competed. Right? Like like, I mean, you could get a little political and make some comments about like Medicare and stuff, like, I don't need to. Like, if superintelligence is good enough to do most people's jobs and, you know, society looks like a society that's, like, supported by UBI, like, do you want that superintelligence to be owned by one company that is, like, effectively in government? Like, I'm not saying that will happen or that that's anybody's intention. I'm saying, I don't think we want that. And I looked around. I asked every launch company how much launch they would sell me and for how much, discovered that the market is completely fucked, and, wanted to do something about it. And and and and it's not like I have. I'm just sounding the alarm that it's a problem.
00:18:54 · Ty Morse
[00:18:54] S0: There's this, funny line, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Yeah. And I got to imagine that the AI data center punch is effectively both, like, a great blessing and a great curse, which is there's, like, infinite demand in space for solar panels. And ironically, you will not be able to put any of your solar panels up in space. So how did you kind of go through the period where you realized this was kind of a fact, and how did you kind of change direction in that period?
00:19:25 · Saurav Shroff
[00:19:25] S1: Well, I mean, I basically told you everything that... Like, I I basically stepped through a 100% of the logic already. And, the more graphic answer is, a friend of mine who probably will know I'm referring to him, but I can't name him by name, asked me some questions, but that that that led me to reconsider my opinion. Okay. So so just for some context, three months ago, I didn't think this was a problem. I was like, yeah, of course, Starship is the best rocket ever made. It's so amazing. Like, it's gonna create infinite supply. And I still believe... I literally still believe that, that Starship is the best rocket ever made, and that it will create pseudo infinite supply of launch services. SpaceX has proven themselves as a ruthlessly competent executor. So three months ago, I thought, fine. You know, build... You you need to build for the biggest possible scale, which is what we're doing here, and which we haven't stopped by the way. It's not like we changed our plans. And we need a big... Build for that big scale because superintelligence is coming that's gonna drive insane demand, and you you you need to be able to service it. And my friend asked me a few questions that led me to reconsider this belief. Led me to consider for the first time, hey, what if actually the incentives work out such that despite having pseudo infinite supply, none is available. Okay. What about a concept? Right? It's like it's like imagine imagine, you know, imagine like a banana plantation, but you're starving. It's confusing. And I stepped through the logic, and I was like, you know, it might actually be the case that we are starving on a banana plantation. And then I asked the banana plantation owners, so to speak, okay, the companies, the rocket companies, you know, what they would sell me and at what price, and discovered that in fact we will soon be starving on the banana plantation, proverbially. And so graphically, what happened is took a deep breath, opened a spreadsheet, and started designing a
00:21:24 · Ty Morse, Saurav Shroff
[00:21:24] S0: rocket. You've been able to drop the cost of a space solar panel by, like, at least an order of magnitude? [00:21:31] S1: Little little... 50 times. [00:21:33] S0: Yeah. 50 times. Can you walk me through why space poll... Solar panels used to cost so much and what you were able to change?
00:21:40 · Saurav Shroff
[00:21:40] S1: Yeah. So, I'll answer the question directly first because I tend to, like, give, like, lots of roundabout answers, which is basically just we we we rebuilt it from first principles. So, long time ago, ten years ago, space solar panels used to be made out of these like super rare earth materials built into wafers. Would cost hundreds of dollars a watt. So we talked about a $5 a watt data set. Okay? A space solar panel from 2010 would cost you $300 a watt, maybe even 1,000. Okay? So like ridiculous sums of money. And they're made this way because, I don't know, like some scientists discovered that if you made it this way, it'd be super, super reliable, and the volumes were low enough that nobody cared how much they cost. This this went on for a long time, where the volumes were were were very low, and people tolerated high cost because their end customer might have been the military, or maybe they were doing, you know, a demo mission for a satellite that they planned to scale but hadn't scaled, and so didn't care about the unit cost of the demo. And this went on 2010 through 2020, maybe even 2023, 2024. And we basically said like, okay, what are the materials? Like the minimum set of materials that you need to make a space solar panel, and, worked completely from first principles up to try to produce a solar panel out of those materials. So like, we didn't say like, how is the old panel made and what about it is expensive? Because the answer is everything. Like every single component. Like you can't even buy one, you know, you can't even buy like the plugs, okay, for for a price that makes sense. And we thought about every single material. So so didn't look at the old one and say how we could make it cheaper, but said, okay, given that we have this cost target and scale target that is driven by the need from dataset, can we invent a solar panel from first principles around material... A material set and a manufacturing process that is both cheap and scalable. So, the the short answer is we started from a complete clean clean sheet, and it turns out that actually a lot of things are solar panels. Like, believe it or not, the LED in your phone, like the... Like when you turn your phone flashlight on, if you shine a bright enough light at that thing, it's a solar panel too. It's just not a very efficient one.
00:23:59 · Saurav Shroff
So a lot of materials that make solar panels, and, the ones that people were using for space were just not the right ones. Now it's not like we didn't run into challenges along the way, like, there are an immense... There is an immensely long list of reasons why solving a problem like this wasn't and isn't trivial. The only thing that's true about now, that wasn't true about whatever, 2010 or 2020, is that in 2010, it looked like, you know, you needed to ship, you know, the size of a small school room, know, like a school classrooms worth of solar panels. Like imagine a school classroom and, you know, laying out a bunch of solar panels on the floor and filling it up, like that was the annual volume. I mean, I'm maybe getting the math like a little bit wrong here, but that was like roughly speaking the annual volume of solar panels for space in 2010 or something like that. And now it looks like the annual demand for solar panels in space will be like, you know, 50,000 football fields a year. And so because the demand is so much bigger, the incentive to make the cost lower is so much higher, and the incentive to develop new processes and invent new materials and test those materials and... Is extremely high. So before we go into the actual solar panel, we need to talk about the two types of cost a solar panel for space has, and it's quite simple. The first is the actual cost, so how much it costs to make, and plus markup, how much we sell it for, which is a really, really compelling price. A price that works for a dataset that costs $5 watt. Okay. So we we list it for $15, but sell it for a lot less than that if you buy a lot of volume. Way, way, way, like the order of magnitude less. The second is the cost of launching it. Okay. So the heavier it is, the more it costs to launch. In fact, earlier we were talking about how a hypothetical 200 kilowatt class dataset might weigh just one metric ton. If you take the solar panels off of, for example, a Starlink satellite, the the solar panels alone will weigh about one metric ton for a 200 kilowatt class satellite. Maybe a little bit more, actually, don't know because I I don't work at SpaceX and I don't have their data, but like roughly speaking, that's about true.