Jack Kuhr
@JackKuhr • 8,927 subscribers
Space industry research director at Payload. Views are my own. jackkuhr.33 on signal. [email protected]
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This is a key point about rocket size. SpaceX has the need (and capital) to deploy 100 Starlinks at a time on Starship. Perhaps Amazon Leo and Blue's TeraWave can get close to that type of demand. But for literally everyone else, building 100 satellites for each launch (and having the 1st sat built wait, not generating revenue, until the 100th is finished) ties up far too much working capital. Hundreds of millions to $1B+ waiting on the ground. It is more economical for satellite operators to launch sats in smaller batches. Which is why Andy picked 15T to LEO reusable. Starlink/Starmind needs 100T to 200T capacity for its ambitions, which is why Starship capacity makes sense for SpaceX (a $2T biz). So, even if Starship lowers the $/kg of launch and satellite manufacturing costs plummet to the floor, only a few satellite operators would have the working capital ability to let all those sats pile up on ground before launch. Most would only be able to fill a fraction of the capacity, thus negating the lower $ per kg to orbit. Terrestrial manufacturers almost never charter entire cargo ships. They ship in batches via containers. Which brings me to rideshare. 1) Even if you run Starship rideshare missions, it'll still be hard to fill out the entire payload bay. 2) And the bigger the rocket, the more complicated organizing rideshare becomes, as it would essentially be 1 or 2 years worth of rideshare missions in one launch. 3) I also think there's a real possibility that SpaceX never manages the hassle of rideshare again and just passes the responsibility off to brokers (raising costs). For many operators, building for Starship would only make sense if there are consistent rideshare missions throughout the year to launch their 1, 2, or 3 sats at a time. Which is possible. But again, largely unfilled Starships negate the $/kg declines. Essentially, Starship is matched with 95% of mass to orbit needs, but not 95% of the needs of operators in the market. A fully reusable Nova block 2 vehicle could be a better product-market fit at a smaller size. Same goes for Neutron, Terran R, and Eclipse, for that matter.
Jack Kuhr73,850 Aufrufe • vor 3 Tagen
Cowboy CEO Baiju Bhatt on why orbital data centers won't just be a SpaceX monopoly. "We're working on it. I think that if there's enough commercial demand for this, and there are enough dollars flowing to this, I think that capitalism is efficient, right?" "I think that as we look at, at least in the US, data centers are not very popular. They're actually quite unpopular, right? "And the intersection between these massive build outs, as we look out to the amount of capacity that people want—we're still kind of the early innings of this stuff." "The frustration from the US population, I see this probably getting worse before it gets better, which means that if AI wants to eat a ton of energy, it's gonna need some other places to get it." "So I think there is a degree of inevitability, not just to data centers in space, but also the other ways of powering AI." "And I think if there's enough commercial activity, you're gonna see a lot of people try to do it. And like I said, we're also doing it." With Mo Islam at the NYSE 🏛
Jack Kuhr125,101 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston joins us at the NYSE 🏛 to chat their $250M round and orbital data centers. "I think we really are talking about by far the largest market opportunity ever." "We had Dylan Patel a few weeks ago saying that by 2040, half of all new compute capacity would be orbital. So we're talking about on the order of $1T a year in new capex spend by 2040." "I think it's unlikely that that will be a monopoly. That sounds surprising to me. I mean, if nothing else, that is a big enough incentive for people to get their act together on building launch vehicles." Full interview, we covered: - NVIDIA and Cisco participation - What Starcloud builds in-house vs. outsource - The launch constraint issue - Competing with SpaceX - Starship - Impact of open source models - Impact of lower cost per token - Storytelling philosophy - Data centers at sea With Mo Islam
Jack Kuhr13,291 Aufrufe • vor 19 Tagen
.Shaun Maguire says SpaceX's data center deal with Google may suggest there is something fundamentally different about the company's terrestrial compute. "I think a lot of people were surprised by the Anthropic and Google announcements. And I think a lot of people are getting the wrong takeaway there." "The way a lot of people are interpreting that is it's like, 'oh, we're just in this temporary compute shortage. And so anyone's willing to work with anyone, and they're willing to pay any price for compute.'" "I think that might be a reasonable way to look at the Anthropic announcement. I don't think that makes sense for looking at the Google announcement." "To me, I think an alternative hypothesis is that SpaceX's terrestrial compute is not actually a commodity. There's something that's better about it than other people's terrestrial compute."
Jack Kuhr44,998 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Lots of talk about 100 kW+ satellites. We asked Apex's Ian Cinnamon how hard they are to build in practice. "To give you a sense of how hard it is to manufacture these at scale. The solar panels that you need on a 100 kW satellite platform are about the size of a football field." "So think about having a football field indoors for each satellite. You need to lay out, fold up, put it together, stow it, test it, deploy it." "Doing one of those? Very doable, not that hard." "Doing 10 of them? Hard." "Doing 100 per year, 10,000 per year? Exceedingly difficult."
Jack Kuhr45,966 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Deploying the Starlab space station will require an operational Starship and a new fairing for the rocket. We asked Starlab's CEO Marshall Smith about the $90M Starship contract. "SpaceX has a contract to go land on the surface of the Moon by '28. We just have to go to orbit. We're already doing that." "So the biggest thing we gotta do now is deal with the fairing, which is in work. I have no doubts or qualms at all that we will be there."
Jack Kuhr26,166 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Varda president and Founders Fund partner delian hops on the show. Varda revenue: "Last year was about an 80-20 split in terms of the top line. 80% on the federal side. 20% on pharma." We chat: - Varda manufacturing - Investor/entrepreneur - SpaceX IPO - xAI + Cusor + ODCs
Jack Kuhr28,193 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
USIT's lizvstein on orbital data center scale-up vs. increased compute innovation on the ground. "I don't know what the mix will look like between the two, because I think that my smooth brain here is that it's a bit of a timing race." "Like, how quickly does Starship ramp to high cadence to hit the economic numbers they need? We've heard anywhere between $100 to $500 per kg into LEO." "How quickly does SpaceX ramp Starship cadence to hit that number versus all of the innovation going on on the ground, and how quickly that ramps and deploys?"
Jack Kuhr19,302 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
.Shaun Maguire says that, in his opinion, if you add the Anthropic and Google deals + Starlink growth, SpaceX could reach a ~$50B revenue run rate in Q4. "That already starts to shatter the narrative that I was hearing two to three weeks ago, which is 'oh, if you look at the Q1 revenue, it's 15% YoY growth, and losing money, and an insane multiple.'"
Jack Kuhr18,061 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
.Shaun Maguire on how fast Starship can accelerate. "To me, I just think it's basically there. The company has essentially demonstrated everything you would need for reusable LEO flight. They have not demonstrated everything you would need for rapidly reusable LEO flight." "In my opinion, they've already done enough to where I feel very confident that they could be flying about 1,000 Starship flights a year with very good unit economics."
Jack Kuhr15,775 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston joins Mo Islam and I at the NYSE. "In order to make data centers in space work, you really need the BOM costs for a 200 kW satellite to be on the order of 1 million dollars." We chat: - Building low cost sats - 20 yr terrestrial vs. 5 yr space - Merge with a launch company? - Does Starcloud exist if Earth's bottlenecks vanish? - Better leader: Altman or Dario - Building sats cheaper than Starlink - GPU failure rate
Jack Kuhr15,180 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
Renaissance founding president and B Capital chairman Howard L Morgan says SpaceX has a monopoly, but it doesn't benefit from network effects like Google or Facebook. "Right now, SpaceX's launch monopoly is a real monopoly, pretty much." "But little bits are being chipped away at the edge. And I think when Blue Origin gets it together, they'll be big. Because everybody wants to go elsewhere." "It's different than Google's search, where you had real network effects. There aren't real network effects in launch. And so they don't get the benefit of that." "Facebook got the benefit of network effects. Google got the benefit of network effects. SpaceX doesn't have the benefit of network effects." "And even in the data center world, there's no real network effect benefit. So there is room for competition."
Jack Kuhr10,324 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
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