Starlink laser terminal

Philip Johnston explains why Starcloud is building orbital data centers: falling launch costs could make abundant solar energy in space useful for meeting growing compute demand. He describes the company’s pivot from beaming solar power to Earth, its first satellite experiments with NVIDIA GPUs, and the engineering work needed to manage heat and radiation. He outlines a product path from early government and military compute contracts toward large orbital systems, while discussing launch economics, fundraising, and hiring. His advice to aspiring space founders is to book an early launch and build a strong technical founding team.