Building the First Data Centers in Space

0:00Philip Johnston:First thing every space company should do is book the first available launch they can. Before they built the thing that they're going to launch. Before they built the thing, before they probably even know what they're going to launch. Booking a launch is such a good forcing function for a space company. So we founded the company January 1st, 2024. January 2nd, we booked the first available SpaceX rideshare launch. And we were like, okay, something is going to be on that rocket. I'm not sure, 100 % sure what it's going to be at this point. But something is going to be on there. Sounds like the same advice for all the software companies.

0:29You just got to keep launching and launching. Same thing.

0:38Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. Today, we're sitting down with Philip Johnston, the co-founder and CEO of StarCloud. StarCloud is building data centers in space to address the energy bottleneck that AI is creating here on Earth. Earlier this year, they raised$170 million, led by Benchmark, and became the fastest growing unicorn in YC history, just 17 months after Demo Day. Philip, welcome to The Light Cone.

1:05Philip Johnston:Thanks so much for having me. So to start off, why data centers in space? So we are very quickly running up on constraints on where we can build new energy projects terrestrially. And so by building them in space, we get access to this almost unlimited low-cost energy in the form of solar. Of course, there's other costs, like the cost of launch. And the cost of launch is actually very rapidly trending down, you know, with new launch vehicles coming online, the Falcon 9 program and Starship on the horizon. And so that's the reason we're building data centers in space. How did you come up with the idea?

1:36It's not sort of like the typical idea that people come up with.

1:42Philip Johnston:I'd actually been working. I was with McKinsey for a few years, working with the space agencies of different governments. And I could see that the launch cost was very rapidly trending down. and actually in early 2023 I decided randomly on a weekend to take a trip down to Starbase Texas where they're building the Starship launch program even before the first launch and not many people were paying attention back then and I could see that they were just building enormous capacity so they're building these two Starship gigafactories they're designed to produce something like three Starships per day and because Starship is reusable you know on a sort of three or four year time frame that could lead to us having thousands of times the capacity to get things to space and so i started thinking okay let's just uh run the clock forward if the launch cost was 10 times lower than it is today and the launch capacity was maybe a thousand times more than we have today what would make sense that that currently doesn't make sense and so started thinking about some of the concepts from sci-fi that i remember as a kid you know like space-based solar where you have these huge solar panels in space you beam that power down um and essentially i just reached out to to a few folks and you know i knew in space industry and got connected with a few others and started you know ideating on okay what would make sense if the launch cost was much lower than it is today i'm curious are there any other ideas that occur to you during this process when you were like thinking of like what what people could build in space uh cheap yeah tons i mean we definitely looked at manufacturing in space and there's varda we looked at asteroid mining and uh you know obviously yc has astroforge um we looked at space hotels we looked at basically anything where which could make sense if the launch cost was a lot lower than it is today And how come data centers was the best choice?

3:20Philip Johnston:Data centers makes a lot of sense to be the first thing you do because you don't need to reenter a product. So with things like asteroid mining or with manufacturing in space or space hotels, they require this very expensive reentry process. Initially, what we actually started doing was space-based solar. So huge solar panels and then you beam that power down. And it's a concept from, I think, like the 60s, even Asimov in the 40s was writing about it. the problem with space-based solar is you actually lose 95 percent of the energy in transmission from space to earth and so for the first two months of the company that was literally what we're doing we were called lumen orbit because of that that reason luminosity in orbit in orbit we were thinking okay once we get that power down what are we going to be using it for and even back in 23 most new energy projects were being built for data centers so we were like okay well either directly or indirectly this power is going to go into data centers let's rerun those numbers so initially we'd run the numbers to know what's the launch cost breakeven that makes sense for space-based solar and we'd come to a number of like 50 dollars a kilo so then we read around the calculations we were like okay let's spend a month figuring out what would the launch cost breakeven need to be to make data centers in space breakeven and we came to a much closer to reality number of 500 dollars a kilo and that's what we think currently that the breakeven launch cost is and so then we rapidly pivoted the company towards that so philip you launched star cloud one in November of 2025 and that was a real emotional moment like can you walk us through what that was like yeah I mean it was incredible so just to tell people a bit about StarCloud 1 so we'd set this launch date you know 18 months in the future and we initially started with something quite unimpressive like we were going to fly some NVIDIA jets and chips they've been flown in space before and we're going to try and do some new new workloads on there yeah so it was that came on and said no we need to do something way way cooler than that and uh we actually ended up putting five gpus on there two three from nvidia two from arm um but the most interesting one was this nvidia h100 we did some crazy things like for example you have to put it through thermal cycling um and we didn't have time to we like book the vacuum chamber the thermal and vacuum chamber and but we needed to know okay if we heat up this phase change material and cool it down and heat it up and cool down is it going to crack anything and so at like 5 a.m the day we had to ship it down we're working through the night adi and ezra are like dunking this thing in an ice bath to cool it down and then we pull it out the ice bath and i'm like are you sure it's going to find me the electronics they're like don't worry about it it's totally fine they pulled it out the ice bath then we had these like like hair dries to heat it up and melt all the wax like all like uh hot air guns and then we're dunking it back in the ice bath it is a miracle that it works to be honest you can just do things you can just do things yeah this so 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 star cloud one and they said 75 million to 100 million dollars and we did the whole of star cloud two including the launch for two million dollars yeah so yeah leading up to the to the launch i mean we we got the most incredible separation video i think we're going to play it now star cloud one separation confirmed 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 uh 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 uh screen behind him playing the star cloud one separation amazing um so no it was the most incredible feeling seeing this uh deploy where was the team for this did you So we took the whole team down.

6:56Philip Johnston:Yeah, there was only 12 in the team at the time of StarClock 1 launch. So we took the whole team to Florida. And we had like 100 friends and family, investors. Some of our team brought their family and kids down. And it was a really nice day. We're going to release a behind-the-scenes video of some of the family moments in that launch. How long was it from when the rocket lifted off until the thing deployed, until you powered it up and were able to verify the thing actually worked? 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 1 a.m they closed the bleachers and everyone had to get on a bus and leave and we're like oh shit i thought we're 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 oh my god it's deploying i can't believe it's deploying um and then it took about 12 hours to make first contact which is not bad actually it usually takes at least 24 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 um like it kept the whole satellite kept restarting every two hours and what was happening was one of 20 different um like failure uh 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 you 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 in orbit um did the first high power inference on on satellite imagery and all this kind of stuff so star cloud one right now as we speak is just left chinese airspace i think yeah it's heading to japan yeah it's going quite fast actually yeah so it travels around 17 000 miles an hour it's uh it's it's about an hour and a half to do one circumnavigation so i mean by star cloud four or so this won't be like one it'll be a giant network sort of covering the earth actually yeah from star cloud three onwards we'll have 88 000 and they'll all fly this one is in what they call mid-inclination orbit so it doesn't go over the poles.

9:17Philip Johnston:Star cloud. 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 enables us to test the hardware. The next one will fly over the poles and that gives us 24-hour always in the sun. In order to do that, you need to put thrusters on the satellite to move it into that orbit. In the end, they will be deployed in that orbit, but you need thrusters anyway to maintain the orbit because you have drag from the upper atmosphere there. What are the engineering and physics trade-offs you have to make this happen, because what you basically are doing with star cloud is you're getting infinite energy because the sun is basically the natural fusion reactor, just a giant mass that generates a nuclear reaction with the giant mass.

10:00And you have infinite energy, basically abundant, and lots of space. But as a result of that, which we're constrained of that in Earth, you have a bunch of other really hard problems to solve, like things around interconnect, how 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 solution with cooling. There's things around radiation to flip the bits in processors. And there's probably other things around how to get the solar panels to become really big and expand.

10:36And many more. I mean, these are the ones that I to think of i mean what are there's like so many things that are just so hard to build yeah you

10:44Philip Johnston: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 50 50 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 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 not new it's not a new physics you know solution it's it's more of a manufacturing and engineering challenge because the you know the international space station has had a radiator which dissipates you know lots of heat already very similar mechanism so uh a liquid cooled 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 um yeah and then on radiation it's just a lot of ground testing in different particle accelerators so we've done um several rounds of testing at the brookhaven national lab particle accelerator for heavy ions and also at the there's a cyclotron for high velocity protons down in knoxville so we ship all of our hardware down there my co-founder addy runs in and out wearing this protective thing addy 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 24 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 i think we're the only people in the world now that know where both an h100 b200 h200 will fail if you blast it with high velocity protons and heavy ions do you have to change any of the underlying electronics to solve the problem or you just build shielding around it uh both both so we do build shielding around it um there's a lot of it is just component selection so for example all of the ssds all the power delivery system all of the power converters and everything else we we test 10 components and whichever the best one is we pick we're trying not to use space grade rad hard uh components we're trying to use off the shelf like automotive style components because it's way cheaper and most people have never tested those in radiation chambers i think that's one of the secrets of how SpaceX has actually reduced a lot of the costs of a lot of the satellites as well.

13:27They use not space-graded electronics, which would be exorbitantly very expensive, but instead you take regular components that there's a supply chain and run through all the tests and make sure if it works. And I think actually this is one of the things that Stranus does as well, to make sure that telecommunication satellites actually work in space. Because they're also in GEO, which has more radiation. Are you in GEO as well? No, we're in Leo. When you first told people that you were going to put data centers in space, what were people's reactions?

14:02Philip Johnston:For a very long time, their reactions was, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. So we actually applied to YC once and we got it. We then tried to raise, and we tried to raise 2 million at 10 posts on a safe. It took three months and we got rejected from at least 100 VCs. And then even after YC, when we went out to raise after demo day, I think we got rejected from at least 20 VCs before we got to the first check. This is one of these ideas that was extremely unpopular with investors. And if you had listened to what all the investors were telling you, you would have quit and not ever done this idea.

14:40I'm curious, why did people tell you that they were not investing? And what did they get wrong?

14:45Philip Johnston:people had a hard time visualizing a world with low-cost launch and and to be fair we're still not out of the woods on that front um you know lots of things need to go right with the starship program for that to make sense so that that's one thing i think it just sounds too sci-fi and too yeah it's a to make this work there's a convergence of two factors one is um the launch cost coming down and people have to believe that the second is it becoming way harder to build stuff terrestrially maybe two years ago that wasn't quite as obvious as it is today now people are like okay well they've just banned building new data centers in new york they're going to ban it in like seven other states now that those two things i think converge to make it more investable essentially and i think the other thing after hearing you explain all the engineering and physics it actually is doable it doesn't sound like sci-fi from first principles like it's actually buildable the reason i had confidence in it um is because we had such a strong engineering team so if you have you know the world's best space engineers saying this is possible and to be frank my background isn't as a space engineer but uh you know i i have full confidence in my two co-founders one from spacex the other was building satellites for nasa saying it's possible then you know that's a it's a it's good enough for me once you had the idea and then i say once you're in yc how did you sort of break the problem down into like a plan for what to do obviously in software You think of your MVP and you launch quickly and you get feedback, but hard to do that with data centers in space.

16:17Philip Johnston:I have a very tangible piece of advice for all space companies. The first thing every space company should do is book the first available launch they can. Before they built the thing that they're going to launch. Before they built the thing, before they probably even know what they're going to launch. Booking a launch is such a good forcing function for a space company. So we founded the company January 1st, 2024. January 2nd we booked the first available SpaceX rideshare launch and it was cheap it's like 300 grand you know which was how far out was the launch it was 18 months out and then it got pushed to 21 months out and we were like okay something is going to be on that rocket I'm not sure 100 % sure what it's going to be at this point but something is going to be on there that's interesting sounds like the same advice for all the software companies just got to keep launching and launching same thing yeah yeah and what we initially planned to launch was very unimpressive actually it was like we were going to put a jetson chip which has been flown on many satellites before and we were going to use it for for kind of edge processing and things we actually had a co-founder change quite early on when we got addy from spacex addy was like oh that's that's lame like let's let's put an h100 on there we're like addy you can't put h100 on a on a satellite he's like sure you can the amount of people who said it was physically impossible to run a pack like a chip that's that power dense um in orbit like people just thought it was like literally impossible to run data centigrade you know gpus on orbit what would have caused it to be impossible there's two things one is the thermal side of things they're very power dense they produce a lot of heat and the second is they'd never been tested in the radiation environment of space um and both of those so for the first one like it's kind of a wacky solution like we submerged the entire thing in this phase change material so everything on star cloud one is submerged in this phase change material.

18:05Philip Johnston:So it's like immersion calling for all of the components, all of the power delivery, memory, everything is submerged. Nobody's ever considered doing anything like that in space before. It's not a particularly scalable solution. It's not like you have quite a low-duty cycle. You have to wait for it to melt, and then it solidifies every so often. But it enables us to prove that you can run the H100 in space. The next one is this director chip liquid cooling architecture that we can run continuously um but yeah i mean i give full credit to my co-founder ali for coming out with some pretty wacky and crazy ideas to get to a data center that's like commercial scale where you can actually like make money on it it's actually like profitable it's going to require many steps how did you like think about like sequencing out like the journey to get there so as i say first step was book whatever the like first launched lowest mvp we can have uh available second step is producing something which is a product we can sell to customers so that's star cloud 2 that's a 10 kilowatt spacecraft that we can sell compute to government and military satellites and then the third step is the product that we're going to be able to sell to hyperscale data centers so that's the star cloud 3 we can it's 200 kilowatt three ton spacecraft about six meters long with that we can fit 50 of them per starship so about 10 megawatts of new compute capacity per starship and we've just filed with the fcc for a constellation of 88 000 of those so that means on the order of 20 gigawatts of new compute capacity wow and we can fit up to 10 terawatts uh in the dawn dust sun synchronous orbit so that's like 20 times the entire us power grid for context what's the largest uh data center deployment on earth because you're talking about 22 gigawatts oh my god what's what's the largest one here on earth today uh they're about a gigawatt is the largest.

19:50What's the timetable for all of this to become real?

19:54Philip Johnston:It's very dependent on the launch cost. And so, you know, the estimates for Starship, if you believe Elon, it'll be end of this year, but let's say it could be end of next year, early 2028 for Starship deploying, you know, ramping up the launch cadence. They're actually phasing out Falcon 9. So they're going to be moving over commercial customers to Starship. There's also a whole bunch of other launch vehicles coming in line. Stokes Base has the Nova rocket. rocket lab has neutron blue glen blue origin has new glen so end of 2028 i'd say is when we're starting to ramp up for the terrestrial business competing with terrestrial data centers so your customers are actually anyone who wants compute and then initially initially it's government and military but then as starship ramps up so for the next two three years we've just won four contracts with various dow and government entities and then initially also um it's people who want that compute actually like for other purposes in space then is that right yeah exactly so right now many satellites are very constrained with the amount of data they can downlink and so using optical terminals we'll have three optical terminals on our second satellite they can ship enormous amounts of raw satellite imagery and SAR data synthetic capital radar data to us we then process that on orbit and then we can just downlink very quickly the insight from that and the insight It might be the coordinates of a vessel or something like that.

21:16In terms of NVIDIA, I mean, how are you partnering with them around chip design? And, you know, are there changes that you have to make to the design to, I mean, as you rescale, like making it more radiation resistant or, you know, what does that look like?

21:31Philip Johnston:Yeah, so we're working very closely with NVIDIA. They recently announced this Space Rubin 1 chip that we're working with them on. so that's designed for the space environment we very heavily modified the h100 to make it work in space so on the mass side of things we stripped out a lot of things like the ac to dc converters the um the direct the cold plates and everything else we sort of stripped out and then we stiffened the board and made it radiation tolerant so because of that we they they're very interested in you know with any people basically that have any data on how one of these high power gpus operates in space.

22:07Philip Johnston:So yeah, we're working with them very closely on designing this new space chip because you can actually do very simple things to make these chips way more effectively, effective to run in space. And so that's what we're doing. YC's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video. I think the thing of getting GPUs to now natively run on DC, you avoid the whole conversion of energy AC-DC because that's what makes solar panels not as efficient, is the whole conversion.

22:45Exactly. You lose a lot of power. Yeah, and our solar panels generate DC

22:48Philip Johnston:immediately, so there's no point doing it. We just need DC-to-DC converters, but that's much better than AC-to-DC converters. So you could unlock a bunch of companies also So just building DPU data centers using solar power, period. Whether in space, under the water, or in Earth. Yeah, I mean, yeah, actually people can definitely use this tech for other things. You talk about StarCloud too a little bit more. Is there actually a Bitcoin miner in there as well? Yes, we will be flying a Bitcoin mining ASIC next year, which the crypto community is very excited about. There's much more enthusiasm than I was expecting, to be honest, about that.

23:25Philip Johnston:Crypto community loves a good narrative. the number of people that want me to launch star coin you have no idea there is actually a star cloud meme coin i think out there yeah don't buy it it's not official not buy the star cloud meme coin yeah yeah so yeah we'll be launching we'll we'll have one of those on there um we'll have a whole bunch more h100s black world ship um we're also partnering with aws on launching the outpost hardware that's their on-premises server blade that they give to customers to run a local instance of VC2 and that will be useful for particularly for our military customers.

24:00Something we were talking about earlier is at YC we just observed over the last few years it's been quite hard for hard tech companies to raise funding in general there's not been much investor appetite for it it certainly seems to have changed over the last six months. From your perspective I'm curious here like how was it raising the seed drowned in jurors of during yc and then this huge round you raised from um from benchmark just sort of maybe tell us the inside story of kind of how that all came together and what it feels like

24:29Philip Johnston:being a hard tech founder raising money today so when we first raised uh end of 2023 we tried to raise two million dollars at 10 post and yeah that took three months to get together about 100 vcs said no yeah deep tech and hard tech and space were definitely not a cool thing to invest in back then um then after yc yeah we we it took us quite a while to raise so i think we got rejected from at least 20 vcs before we got our first uh first check on the demo day raise and things have definitely swung around since then um it's become a lot uh easier to raise for deep tech i think i think a number of reasons for that one is people think that software doesn't have a moat anymore which i think is probably accurate that sort of high it's funny like the hive mind just switched like yeah it seemed to me like very quickly it was just like the sas stocks like claude code came out sas stock public company stocks all went down and then suddenly it like was it i i think the like fastest i've seen sort of things in the public markets like directly affect demo day where suddenly everyone's like oh like we need to like invest in the heart tech now yeah that's that's fascinating yeah i think yeah people are just much more open to investing in heart now yeah like i think we were the first space investment benchmark we've done yeah i mean whatever you can share like how did that round kind of come together and um and again what do you think sort of benchmark saw in sort of you guys so to be frank that round wasn't as easy as it looks from the outside um there's a lot of vcs that have big space expositions for one thing and spacex like midway through the round came out saying they're doing exactly what we're doing and it wasn't public then and so anybody with like a conflict policy then was like okay we're conflicted out um but i mean towards the end of the round it certainly came together much faster I think to be frank, I don't think so.

26:12Philip Johnston:Chathan is our partner. Chathan is awesome. Amazing investor. Yeah, he's great. I think basically he saw a really, really strong technical team doing something that if it worked could be incredible. And I think when he came to visit us, you know, he spent a lot of time doing DD on other things, you know, on the backgrounds of all of our, we've got the best. We literally have the best freaking engineering team in the world in Redmond building this stuff. half of them from SpaceX, half from some of the hyperscalers. So he spent a lot of time with the team. He spent a lot of time. But I don't think if he'd come across a report that said that cooling in space was impossible, that that would have thrown him off.

26:53Philip Johnston:I think he was like, okay, this is a good enough team that they can figure it out. How did you build such an awesome team? So my co-founders, Addy and Ezra, well, with Ezra, I reached out to him after I'd been down to starbase texas and i was like have you got any ideas that would make money if uh launch cost was 10x cheaper than it is today and we started with this space-based solo idea um with adi who's introduced to a friend through a friend and he actually had already been thinking about this um he already had registered the domain name stellarcloud.com before and then with the team we were just ruthlessly slow at hiring and like picky about hiring after yc we'd raised uh like 11 million at 40 which is like a decent round in yc and even then it took us six months to make our first hire um and we've got like the most kick-ass space engineer as our first hire we've raised like a lot of money now even this round that we announced in march we've raised a much larger round since then we're still only 20 engineers like the and we have one commercial guy who came from the space force who was working on golden dome um we are so picky about who we hire Like it is to a point of being very frustrating, to be honest, but it's the whole game.

28:04Philip Johnston:It's the whole game is having a kick-ass engineering team. What was it like to have this idea, have people sort of poo-poo it, like didn't really get it. And then suddenly, I mean, to have much more commercial validation that like, you know, Google, SpaceX, the stalwarts of the industry sort of embrace the idea and realize actually like some crazy percentage of future data centers likely are going to be in space. space what was that like to sort of see the the sea change and be early it was surreal so if you go back through my twitter feed i've been like shouting from the rooftops for the last like three years about this contrarian but right every day i would post something about like why data systems space are going to be are going to make sense and then slowly and slowly and slowly people would start to drop hints about things like elon at one point was like 99.999 percent of the energy in the in the solar system is is is from the sun so i'd repost that and be like we need to build data centers in space like i would like everything i would find a hook for like i think this is one of the things we see with all the best hard tech founders you're essentially living in the future and are almost like a prophet that brings the future back to now us underlings and the earth that don't quite get it yet.

29:26Philip Johnston:I'm going to tell my mom, who's very religious, that YC said I'm a prophet. But I think that's cool. And the other thing that's fascinating to me is that your background, if you go on your LinkedIn, is not very legible that you would be in space. But you had a background previously doing software and physics and then went to business, but nothing there that sets space. Yeah. So for people who don't know my background, I spent the first five years of my career as an engineer on the software side, studying math and physics before that, undergrad and master's. And then I went to McKinsey, more on the commercial product side.

30:06Philip Johnston:But I actually ended up doing a couple of projects with national space agencies on different satellite missions. and that's where I really started to notice the launch cost coming down very rapidly. I actually had another startup before this and yeah, when I left that one, decided, okay, if I'm going to do another startup, it has to be something I'm like very passionate about. And yeah, for my whole life, I've been very passionate about space. Because I don't have a space engineering background, realized, okay, I'm going to need the world's most kick-ass space engineers. And actually, this is where I give credit to YC.

30:37Philip Johnston:I was kind of blindly following the YC advice. I was like, okay, the first thing we need to do before coming up with an idea is get the most incredible space engineers in the world on the team, essentially. This was before you even knew what you wanted to do in space. All you knew at that point was that launch costs were going to come down dramatically and there was going to be cool stuff to do in space. And you wanted to find some space people to do it with. Yes, literally, that's literally it. But it wasn't a vibe of like, oh, can you please build this crazy idea that I have? No, no. It's like the reverse even.

31:08Exactly. I'm going to figure out the commercial part.

31:11Philip Johnston:Yeah, exactly. My pitch to Addy and Ezra was essentially, if you have any ideas that would make sense if the launch cost was 10x less than it is today, I can figure out everything else around that besides the building the satellite piece. How did you find them? How did you recruit them? So Ezra and I had grown up in the same place in the UK. Actually, to be frank, I messaged a lot of space engineers. Maybe 10 of them took a call and two of them said yes. That might do go fast. It's all you need. You don't need like 100 people to do it. You only need one or two. So Philip, during the batch, the way I thought about StarCloud was that it could only work if you were able to make it cheaper per unit of compute than like ground-based compute.

31:54And I think you will. But it's occurred to me since then that like it's not actually clear to me anymore that that is necessary for StarCloud to succeed. I'm curious if you think about it the same way, because since the batch, we've learned that AI data centers are becoming politically incredibly unpopular. And it seems not unlikely to me that it will soon become basically de facto impossible to build AI data centers anywhere, at least in a democratically hiked country. I'm curious how you think about that, how it affects your plans for the company.

32:24Philip Johnston:Yeah, 100%. And this has moved faster than I was expecting as well, to be honest. We've just seen New York now blocking data centers construction. For reasons which are not grounded in science, really, it seems more like vibes than anything else. Building these things in space will definitely be much easier from a regulatory perspective. So let's do some myth busting. There are a lot of misconceptions about certainly water and data centers, but also power. What are some of the things that come to your mind? With water specifically, water is really actually just a function of power. You can cool data centers with no daily consumptive use of water if you just throw more power at the problem, essentially.

33:12Philip Johnston:And that is what all of the data center companies are now proposing. It's very unlikely that any data center company proposes any data center that is going to be consuming daily amounts of water. And there is actually evidence that you can have closed loop systems that consume very little water. And I think the analogy is like if you ran a burger shop, like a fairly large data center with like hundreds of megawatts would consume about the same amount of water as like a McDonald's. Yeah. So it's like it's really, you know, a non-issue, but it's unbelievable that they're repeating this so much. Yeah.

33:47Philip Johnston:They do use a lot of power there. And so most new power projects for data centers right now are being built with natural gas generators, actually. And so there's certainly some people that are pushing back on those. I mean, you know, one of the arguments is that as data centers get built, they sort of compete on the grid, which is kind of not true. I mean, also not true if you build a new power project for it. Right. Which is generally what people are doing. You just can't get enough power from the grid. So there's also some evidence, actually, that adding data centers increases the capacity of the grid and then prices actually come down over time.