Starcloud CEO @PhilipJohnston says it could do fine without Starship given its govt. contracts. But it needs Starship to profitably handle terrestrial AI workloads. "The big bet of the industry is that Starship will be operating and will be able to take a decent portion of the industry's payloads. But remains to be seen." "We can survive without Starship just on the military and government contracts we have. That works fine with the current launch cost." "But in order to be cost competitive with terrestrial data centers, we would need more like a Starship." With @itsmoislam at the @NYSE

Starcloud CEO @PhilipJohnston 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 @itsmoislam

Crucially, Pecan Island is ~30 miles away from the nearest town and 50 miles from a major city. Starship is insanely loud: - At 5 miles out, my wife had to cover her ears - At 12 miles, it sounds like a table saw (good BYU study on this) - At 20 miles, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner (BYU study) - At 30 miles out, dissipates even further, prob still noticeable but more distant For comparison: - Boca Chica: 5 miles from South Padre Island (major vacation hub). And 15 miles away from Brownsville (major city). Starship launches are quite disruptive to the city. - Cape: 15 miles away from Titusville, Cocoa, Cape Canaveral. 50 miles from Orlando. Eventually, particularly in Brownsville, community pushback will cap cadence. For SpaceX to get to 30+ launches a day, this is the way.