This Week in Startups
01:14:35 · Jason Calacanis
[01:14:35] S0: Absolute... Absolutely viable after three or four iterations. The same way Internet via satellite was viable, but we spent ten years in the wilderness with slow Internet. You know, if you were on a ranch somewhere, you could have a very expensive Internet connection via satellite. It was originally giant satellites, then medium sized, then smaller, huge satellites, whatever they were. And, you know, sometimes I'd rent an Airbnb, you know, somewhere on the edge where they didn't have broadband. And they would give it to you, but, you know, you'd watch one Netflix movie, it would time out and say you hit your limit. Yeah. So they had it, like, limited by a certain amount of bandwidth, and they charge. It wasn't unlimited. So that all changed. And now we sit here with Starlink, and we're like, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And it is. And and there'll be three competitors. Amazon's got LEO, I guess. Mhmm. They're low Earth orbit satellites. It's gonna be a same similar timeline here. We might spend a decade, you know, making proof of concepts and things that can lightly do this stuff, but it really is all based on Starship. Starship has a massive amount of payload. I don't know if it's 10 or 20 times the previous falcons, but it's significantly more. I I actually have been inside that. When they were first making them, I was at Starbase with Elon, and we were standing inside of it, the first prototype that was, like, hand welded together. I mean, and you look up, it's like you're looking into a small office tower. I know how to explain it, but you're looking into a payload that could be 200 people in seats. Yeah. Know? You're looking into a Boeing.
01:16:17 · Lon Harris
[01:16:17] S1: Starship can lift a 100 to a 150,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. That's about four to 6.5 times more than Falcon nine's capacity.
01:16:26 · Jason Calacanis
[01:16:26] S0: Okay. So if it's five times the Falcon launches and they think they can do multiple a day, then this kind of project becomes viable. I believe these satellites are gonna be bigger, more complex, more batteries than the Starlink ones, which I think are are are smaller. But who's this... I mean, these could have Starlink and compute in them. So, like, why would you put the Starlinks out there and not include some compute in them? They obviously have some computers in them. So this will be viable. And then what we're gonna see is people on planet Earth saying, please stop putting them in space. Can I get them in my backyard? Because they want the revenue from it. The real estate cost is free out there for life. Yeah. Free for life. And I think the energy cost out there is gonna be also with solar free for life. So you take those two costs out, and that's the end state. Now getting to the end state, gonna cost tens of billions of dollars, or maybe billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars. But if you're building trillions of dollars worth of compute, if it costs $10,000,000,000 to perfect this technology, well worth it. And maybe it takes four years to pay off, three years to pay off the cost of getting to space. But there's no real estate. There's no permits. There's no issue. And people don't understand the vastness of space, Lon. If you look at planet Earth, like, if you if you just think about the surface area of the Earth, it's huge, right? And most of the surface area of Earth is water. And then there's a bunch of it that's not used,
01:17:56 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:17:56] S1: Like desert, like tundra, and exactly. [01:17:59] S0: Ice caps, none of it's used. Then... And rainforests, there's still a lot of those, thankfully. Now imagine you go out into space, and it's two times the surface area because... And I don't know if low Earth orbit... This would be a good question for Claude, if you can type it real fast. What is the surface area of the circumference of where the satellites, the Starlink satellites are compared to Earth. Like, it would probably be twice as much surface area or a third more surface area. It's some larger number of surface area. Right, Lon? Because [01:18:38] S1: Well, it's also [01:18:39] S0: you're expanding three out into space. [01:18:40] S1: I think it's... There's a three dimensionality aspect too. Like, the surface of the earth is sort of flat. Not like the earth is round, but, like, the surface is two d. Whereas you could... Like, in low Earth orbit, one thing could be up here, one thing could be down. You know? Like, I I don't I don't know if it's an exact, but, Earth's surface area is about a 197,000,000 square miles. So if you think of the inner boundary of low Earth orbit as a spherical shell, it's about 5% larger than the Earth's surface. But if you think of low Earth's orbit's outer boundary as a different spherical shell, it's 73% larger than the Earth's surface. So that's why I was saying, like, three d space, low Earth orbit is a huge distance ring around the Earth. So where you measure on that sphere makes a huge amount of difference.
01:18:40 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:18:40] S1: I think it's... There's a three dimensionality aspect too. Like, the surface of the earth is sort of flat. Not like the earth is round, but, like, the surface is two d. Whereas you could... Like, in low Earth orbit, one thing could be up here, one thing could be down. You know? Like, I I don't I don't know if it's an exact, but, Earth's surface area is about a 197,000,000 square miles. So if you think of the inner boundary of low Earth orbit as a spherical shell, it's about 5% larger than the Earth's surface. But if you think of low Earth's orbit's outer boundary as a different spherical shell, it's 73% larger than the Earth's surface. So that's why I was saying, like, three d space, low Earth orbit is a huge distance ring around the Earth. So where you measure on that sphere makes a huge amount of difference. [01:19:32] S0: Yeah. So the question is how many miles deep is, low Earth orbit. [01:19:38] S1: Yeah. It starts at about a 160 kilometers above the Earth, and then it goes to 2,000 kilometers above the Earth. [01:19:45] S0: Wow. So it's gotta be hundreds [01:19:50] S1: I'm gonna look [01:19:50] S0: it up by miles. It's probably a thousand miles. [01:19:53] S1: It's 1,143 miles. [01:19:56] S0: Okay. So you have a thousand miles [01:19:59] S1: of space going
01:19:59 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:19:59] S1: of space going [01:20:00] S0: So let's just say it was the same as the Earth. Let's just take out the calculation. Yeah. That low Earth orbit. Let's just say it's the same as the Earth. It's not 73% bigger or whatever. You have 1,000 times the surface area of the Earth to put these things. 1,000 times. And we're not using the surface area. The current surface data centers on the current surface area of Earth are what? Point 001%? Nothing. Data centers probably take out, like, point 00001% of Earth. This is why the whole debate over them is silly. [01:20:35] S1: Yeah. A negligible fraction of a percent is what AI says. [01:20:41] S0: Yes. So even if we were at 1% of it, now you've got a thousand times that ability, and you don't have anybody to complain. Oh, you're taking my energy, my water, there's noise pollution, it's just up there. So it's the obvious end state. And additionally, you would think that at some point if we master this and we can get things back and forth, you might start manufacturing stuff out there. Now this sounds crazy. Like, why would we put a factory up there and make cars and then ship the cars back down? That seems crazy. But if the cars are staying up there Right. We're eventually gonna have manufacturing in space. [01:21:16] S1: Exactly. It's like to to to fuel the factories and the mining and all the other things that are happening in space. You wouldn't need to send stuff back to to the Earth.