Philip Johnston

speaker

376 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 5 Aug

Philip Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Y Combinator Startup Podcast · Building the First Data Centers in Space · 5 Aug 2026 podcast

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 timeframe, 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 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

Yeah, tons.

I mean, we definitely looked at manufacturing in space and there's Varda.

We looked at asteroid mining and obviously YC has Astroforge.

We looked at space hotels.

We looked at

But basically anything which could make sense if the launch cost was a lot lower than it is today.

Data centers makes a lot of sense to be the first thing you do because you don't need to re-enter 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% of the energy in transmission from space to Earth.

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