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.
00:26:12 · Saurav Shroff
So to make the platonic ideal best and cheapest solar panel that delivers the lowest levelized cost of electricity in space, You need it both to be extremely cheap to manufacture, so it can't be made out of rare earth materials. It can't be made out of things that are in short supply. It has to be made out of common materials, and it can't be made out of any processes that are ex exquisite, or challenging, or extremely high temperature, or require like very very precise instrumentation. Without revealing too much, because like I can't I can't you know I can't I'd love to I'd love to just be like okay, step one, step two, I can't talk about the exact recipe, but we... When we started, we asked ourselves like, okay, are there other optoelectronic devices? So that the broad umbrella term for for things that are solar panels and LED lights and stuff are optoelectronics. Are there other optoelectronic devices that meet the requirements we have, which are that it's extremely like dirt cheap to manufacture, like negligibly cheap to manufacture, meaning it's made out of super commonplace materials, and it's made out of materials that are either printed or deposited or in in in some capacity ultra ultra thin. And turns out that there is, and it's called an OLED. An OLED is an organic light emitting diode or a light emitting diode display, and everybody maybe hasn't heard the term, but has certainly used one because just about every iPhone uses an OLED display as a screen on the front. So the screen of an iPhone is an OLED display, and an OLED display is made using most of the same processes as our solar panel. So, one of the funny terms that I like to use is an... Is is to describe the solar panel as an OLED, an organic light absorbing diode. Because it is a diode, it is, light absorbing, and it is manufactured very much like an like an OLED display, which is very, very cheap. So the solar panel is really like a cheaper and light absorbing light absorbing optimized version of an OLED display, and we know that it is roughly as cheap as it can get, because the materials that it uses are absolutely commonplace materials. There are materials that if I told you the names of all the materials, you could go online and buy them all in one day for a few $100, and have them tomorrow. Like, they're not... Like, we're not...
00:28:31 · Saurav Shroff, Ty Morse
From like, you know, like Africa or, you know, some weird... Like, every single ingredient can be bought in every single country, can be made in, like, hundreds of countries in the world. Super commonplace materials. The processes are also very simple, and we know that it is the absolute thinnest that it can be because if it were any thinner, it would reach a limit of thinness where it would be physically impossible for it to be anything but transparent. In other words, it is so thin that if it were thinner, it would be see through, and something that is see through is not a solar panel by definition. So, if you guys wanna take a look at it, I have one here. This is what it looks like, and, you can see it's like, you know, roughly speaking as thin as piece of paper. This one is a little bit thicker than a piece of paper, by about 20%, and, it's unbelievable. I... This is a is a piece of paper that you can roll up, and it generates electricity. [00:29:28] S0: So, I guess this may be a slightly crazy question, but how does the thickness of the solar panel, because most solar panels that I've seen are incredibly thick, like Yep. An Why does this work?