Why Starcloud launches every year instead of one big bet

So I don't think we'll have a ground footprint at all really, except for this facility behind me.

Got it. But that brings me to the question of cost efficiency. In comparison to other space startups, I find it radical how you iterate very often and keep those cycles short.

In order to have these iterations, I need to break it down to small parts and have runway that supports me. How do you balance this? Does your cap table back this up — are investors happy seeing momentum rather than short-term returns?

Yeah, that's a good question. It's quite a CapEx-heavy business at the beginning. There's a few approaches — one: spend enormous CapEx building something elaborate, then launch it and hope it works. If it doesn't, you shut down.

The other is you launch every year incrementally. We've taken the second approach — launching incrementally.

First launch is going up in November this year — first H100s onboard, about a hundred times more powerful GPU compute than has been in space before. Second one going up in October next year.

We'll have the first Blackwell architecture from Nvidia. That one will be the first to provide a commercial service. We want to generate cash from the second satellite onwards.

Also to be fair, we're doing it cheaply. We raised a $2.5M pre-seed and the whole first satellite was designed, built, and will launch for that $2.5M — dirt cheap compared to any other space startup.