239. Space PPAs for satellites - Jul26

**Laurent Segalen** (0:04)
With Laurent Segalen from London and Gerard Reid from Berlin, this is Redefining Energy.

**Laurent Segalen** (0:10)
Today, on Redefining Energy, Gerard, we're going to talk about space.

**Gerard Reid** (0:16)
The final frontier. Space, a final frontier.

**Laurent Segalen** (0:32)
There's been so much debate, conversation around data centers in space, and especially all the excitement around the SpaceX IPO, that we really wanted to know if it was science fiction or if it was for real.

**Gerard Reid** (0:46)
Absolutely.

**Elon Musk** (0:46)
Totally right.

**Gerard Reid** (0:47)
Yeah.

**Laurent Segalen** (0:48)
Before we introduce our guest, I have a one-minute clip from Elon Musk explaining why half of the data centers will be in space in a few years. Let's listen to the clip.

**Elon Musk** (1:00)
The availability of energy is the issue. If you look at electrical output outside of China, everywhere outside of China, it's more or less flat. But if you're putting data centers anywhere except China, where are you going to get your electricity, especially as you scale? The output of chips is growing pretty much exponentially, but the output of electricity is flat. So how are you going to turn them with chips on? It's harder to scale on ground than it is to scale in space. But also, you're going to get about five times the effectiveness of solar panels in space versus the ground, and you don't need batteries because you don't have a day-night cycle or seasonality, clouds, or an atmosphere in space. So it's actually much cheaper to do it in space.
My prediction is that it will be by far the cheapest place to put AI will be space in 36 months or less. You can mock my words.
In 36 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space.

**Gerard Reid** (1:53)
Laurent, I'm not going to bet against Elon Musk on that. That's what I would say to him. Now, his timing might be out a little bit. As usual.
I definitely think we're going to get there.

**Laurent Segalen** (2:04)
Now, the data centers are not the only thing in space. There's a lot of satellites already and more coming.
So, our guest had an idea and this guy has already built two space companies. So, you know what he's talking about is at the Innovation and Engineering Committee at NASA. His idea is to help refuel the satellites.

**Gerard Reid** (2:29)
Yes. Laurent, we were really lucky to get one of those pioneers to come on the show. And this is Andrew Rush. He's the CEO of Star Catcher.
As he said, what they're doing is they're building the world's first orbital electrical grid.

**Laurent Segalen** (2:43)
And he is signing PPAs, PRIS Satellite Company, which is absolutely extraordinary. So, let's bring you on the show and try to understand what energy as a service platform in space is all about.

**Gerard Reid** (2:57)
Absolutely.

**Laurent Segalen** (3:11)
Andrew, welcome to the show.

**Andrew Rush** (3:13)
Thank you for having me.

**Gerard Reid** (3:14)
Andrew, great to have you. And I'd like to really kick off with a simple question, which is, if I look at what you're doing, you're trying to build the world's first orbital energy grid. Can you just please explain to us what that is?

**Andrew Rush** (3:29)
Yeah, we live in an amazing time. We live in basically the second Golden Age, and we've seen the number of satellites on orbit go from 1,000 to now 10,000 and soon to be 100,000.
Every satellite in space has its own power generator. They're all going on basically camping trips to space. They have their own solar arrays. When they see the sun, they charge up. When they don't, they live off of batteries. This is really constraining, and in fact, the average satellite in space has something like 1,500 watts of power availability on board, about as much as my kid's gaming computer uses.
But we want our satellites to act like cell phone towers in space. We want to do orbital compute in space. We want to do manufacturing one day. We take amazing high-resolution images and process those and send them down to earth. All of these things are really power intense. So there's a disconnect between the amount of power available and what we want to do in space. At Star Catcher, the company that I co-founded, we are solving this problem by building a power grid in space that collects energy from the sun and concentrates it and then distributes that energy to our client satellites by sending them basically the kinds of light that solar arrays are already really good at turning into power. It's basically visible in near-infrared light. So we're building a grid in space that will beam energy from our satellite to our client satellites so that they don't have just 1,500 watts of power availability. They have like 15,000 or 100,000 watts. I'm beginning to have enough power to answer the call of what we are building in the future in space.