Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:06:03 · S3, Philip Johnston, S4, S2, S1
[00:06:03] S3: You can just do things. [00:06:04] S0: You can just do things. Yeah. This is this is the kind of thing you can do as a startup because we actually had a quote from one of the primes on what it would cost to do StarCloud one, they said 75,000,000 to a $100,000,000. I mean, [00:06:13] S4: we did the [00:06:14] S0: whole of StarCloud two, including the launch for $2,000,000. Yeah. So, yeah, leading up to the to the launch, I mean, we we got the most incredible separation video. I think we're gonna play it [00:06:23] S2: now. Starcloud one, separation confirmed. [00:06:26] S0: So half the time as it deploys, it will be behind the shadow of the earth and you don't see anything. The other half of the time, it will deploy not into the silhouette of the earth. And so, I mean, it just is the most perfect, like, deployment video I've ever seen. And this was played by Jensen as he walked on stage at the GTC conference this year. This five story tall, like, screen behind him playing the StarCloud one separation [00:06:48] S3: video. Amazing. [00:06:50] S0: So, no, it was the most incredible feeling seeing this, deploy. [00:06:53] S1: Where was the team for this? Did you all, like,
00:06:53 · S1, Philip Johnston
[00:06:53] S1: Where was the team for this? Did you all, like, [00:06:55] S0: go team down. Yeah. There was only, 12 in the team at the time of StarCloud one launch, so we took the whole team to Florida. And we had, like, a 100 friends and family, investors. We... Some of our team brought their family and kids down, and, like, it was a real nice, really nice day. We're gonna release a a behind the scenes video of some of the, like, family moments in that, launch. [00:07:15] S1: How long was it from, like, when the rocket lifted off until the thing deployed, until you powered it up and were able to verify the thing actually worked?
00:07:22 · Philip Johnston
[00:07:22] S0: Yeah. So it lifted off. We were all on what they call the banana bleachers. It's like the famous from the Apollo era, but it was in the middle of the night. So it lifted off at around midnight. And then at 1AM, they closed the bleachers and everyone had to get on a bus and leave. And we're like, oh, shit. I thought we were gonna, like, be able to watch the deployment. And then I'm sitting in the back of a cab, like watching the live feed on spacex.com literally. And I was like, oh my god. It's deploying. I can't... It's deploying. And then it took about twelve hours to make first contact, which is not bad actually. It usually takes at least twenty four hours to get first contact. And then it's like a two week commissioning period, and we had a whole bunch of software issues we had to work through. Like, it kept re... The the whole satellite kept restarting every two hours. And what was happening is one of 20 different, like, failure, like triggers was triggering, And we didn't know which one it was, and we can only get a ground station pass every, like, at least every hour and a half, maybe longer. And so we had to manually turn off each one, turn back on everything else, and wait for a ground station pass to know which one it was. So that took, like, know, that took, like, three days just to figure out that software issue. And then, yeah, two weeks after that, then we started commissioning and turning on all the different payloads, and then we trained the first model, ran the first version of Gemini. We did the first fine tuning of a model on... In orbit, Did the first high powered inference on on satellite imagery and all this kind of stuff.
00:08:42 · S3, Philip Johnston, S1
[00:08:42] S3: So StarCloud one right now as we speak has just left Chinese airspace, I think. Yeah. Heading to Japan. Yeah. Yeah. It's going quite fast, actually. [00:08:52] S0: Yeah. So it travels around 17,000 miles an hour. It's it's about an hour and a half to do one circumnavigation. [00:08:59] S3: So I mean, by StarCloud four or so, this won't be, like, one. It'll be a giant network sort of covering the Earth, actually. [00:09:08] S0: Yeah. From StarCloud three onwards, we'll have 88,000, and they'll all fly. This one is what... In what they call mid inclination orbit, so it doesn't go over the poles, StarCloud. And and that's another point here on how janky this one is. It doesn't even fly in the right orbit, but at least it it it enables us to test the hardware. The next one will fly over the poles, and that gives us twenty four hour always in the sun. [00:09:32] S1: In order to do that, you need to put thrusters on the satellite to move it into that orbit? [00:09:35] S0: In the end, they will be deployed in that orbit, but you need thrusters anyway to maintain the orbit because you have, you know, drag from the upper atmosphere there.
00:09:35 · Philip Johnston, S2
[00:09:35] S0: In the end, they will be deployed in that orbit, but you need thrusters anyway to maintain the orbit because you have, you know, drag from the upper atmosphere there. [00:09:42] S2: What are the engineering and physics trade offs you have to make this happen? Because what you basically are doing with StarCloud is you're getting infinite energy because the sun is basically the natural fusion reactors. It's a giant mass that generates a nuclear reaction with the giant mass, and you have infinite energy, basically abundant, and lots of space. But as a result of that, which we... We're constrained of that in Earth. You have a bunch of other really hard problems to solve, like things around interconnect, how do you send all the data back and forth back to Earth, how do you handle cooling. People think that space is cold, but actually, there's no... Unlike Earth, there's no air to circulate it back. So you need some crazy solutions with cooling. There's things around radiation to flip the bits in in in processors. And there's probably other things around how to get the solar panels to become really big and expand and many more. I mean, these are the ones that I could think of. I mean, what are... There's, like, so many things that are just so hard to build.
00:10:44 · Philip Johnston
[00:10:44] S0: Yeah. You are correct. There are many engineering challenges to to to be solved. The two biggest ones that are outstanding and, most of our engineering our engineering team is split basically fifty fifty down these two lines is number one, as you mentioned, how do you get rid of this heat in a vacuum? And then number two, how do we make the chips work in a higher radiation environment? Some of the other problems are being solved by other people. You know, the interconnect, we've just signed a contract with SpaceX for our next 20 satellites to have a Starlink laser terminal that gives us very high bandwidth, low latency connectivity. Other people are solving some other parts of this. The the core ones we're solving are that. And so for the first one, for the thermal management side of things, we are building a very large, low cost and low mass deployable radiator. Now radiators in space are are not new. It's not a new physics, you know, solution. It's it's more of a manufacturing and engineering challenge. Because the the, you know, the International Space Station has had a radiator which dissipates, you know, lots of heat already, very similar mechanism. So, a liquid called loop. Well, the challenge with it is making it cheap and light. So our radiator is at least 10 times less mass per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator and 500 times less cost per watt of dissipation than the ISS radiator. So very low bench... Very easy benchmark to beat on cost for the ISS. But, yeah. And then on radiation, it's just a lot of ground testing in different particle accelerators. So we've done several rounds of testing at the Brookhaven National Lab particle accelerator for heavy ions. And also the... There's a cyclotron for high velocity protons down in Knoxville. So we ship all of our hardware down there. My cofounder Adi runs in and out wearing this protective thing. Adi is a lunatic when he comes to this stuff. He's like, oh, yes. It's the same as flying transatlantic. Don't worry about the radiation. So, yeah, basically, you expose it over a twenty four hour period to the same radiation dose that you would have in a five year mission. And then that... All of that telemetry and data then informs our choice on both shielding and software to mitigate bit flips.