SpaceX Starfall And Apple Price Hikes | The Brainstorm 138

**Sam** (0:00)
This week, we are talking SpaceX Starfall, maybe the last star named product from SpaceX, memory prices going up across the board, and AI competition from open weight models. Brett, are Starfall items going to come down and land on our heads? What is this product? Why is it so interesting?

**Brett** (0:22)
Yeah, so Starfall is basically a standardized form factor for delivering goods from orbit.
You know, the cost of getting something back from orbit is much, much higher than the cost of getting something into orbit, at least in one piece. You can burn it up on the way down. And so the Starfall containers are, call it pucks, but they are, you know, on the order of 10 feet across and a couple feet deep, and they fit nicely into SpaceX's Starship. And the idea here is you could have a manufactured, an automated manufacturing process that needs microgravity in order to work, sitting inside one of these pucks, and then you can get the products back. And so people have speculated, and some have demonstrated that microgravity could be good for growing crystals and doing pharmaceutical stuff and maybe some high-end electronics manufacturing. And it also means that you could, you know, lob something around the earth in half an hour to an hour and drop it onto a mountaintop, and that something could be, you know, basically micro shipping container worth of drones in a Starlink satellite or something, Department of Defense useful. And so this is a, you know, new to the world capability to deploy physical assets into a location on very short notice anywhere on earth.

**Sam** (1:44)
Yes, that is a scary thought. Orbitally injected drone swarms coming to mountaintops near you.

**Brett** (1:53)
Yeah, I mean, and it does seem, and this is, you know, a company we partnered with, Mach 33's work, but they, they, you know, dimension that the cost to return things from orbit was 50 times the cost to send things up to orbit. So if you have to spend a thousand times to send things up, you spend $50,000 per kilogram to get them back down. And this could reduce that cost premium from 50x to, you know, single digit or sorry, low double digit percentages.
So if the Star ship can launch goods at, you know, less than $100 per kilogram, we think it'll get down to, you know, 50 to 70 Then you can maybe get things back for $100 per kilogram. So this is the, you know, a real performance improvement curve in an area where the unit economics and what people can find to use this for haven't been fully explored. Mostly we've been returning humans from space. This isn't set up to do that. But you can imagine, yeah, getting anything like Amazon Prime on steroids anywhere in the world could be useful for many military applications, but also, you know, human aid applications and, you know, other areas where it's like, I need this thing in this spot at this moment, or I need this thing that's in space, that's, you know, doing some kind of manufacturing process back to my facility so it can be on processed, you know, that could prove useful in probably unexpected ways.

**Sam** (3:22)
Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. Is this the cost decline that, you know, we always talk about cost declines tipping over, you know, these break even or unlock points that unlock exponential demand. And I think, you know, in space manufacturing has been one of those items where people have always hand waved. It was kind of like earth observation, I would say, right? It's like, no, no, there's a huge market beyond government and defense. But it's actually like, oh, defense just became a bigger market for that. Like no one else is out there necessarily buying this. And for in space manufacturing, it's always been pharmaceuticals. Oh, you could spin fiber incredibly well. No, like eyes and things like that that need microgravity.
Are those industries about to materialize? And have they only been held up because of the offside unit economics?
Or do you think there's a lot to be done here and figuring out what the real application is?

**Brett** (4:31)
I think it's really uncertain because this is a dramatic change in the cost structure. And so naturally you would bring things on the offside and the military application seems very obvious and very obviously useful. Whereas, you know, how much microgravity manufacturing could we possibly need as inputs to other industries? And they have to be inputs that you are tolerant of there being a lot of latency because, you know, you're sending it up and you're getting it back. It's almost like, you know, contract manufacturing, you know, to someone external to you. You have to design an automated manufacturing system that fits in this thing. Like, there's a lot of steps to even discover whether or not there's a market there.