Latest Interviews
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Clear all filters- Y Combinator16 min
Inside The Startup Building Reusable Rockets
Aaron Epstein, Andy Lapsa, Tom Feldman
Stokes Space, founded in 2019 by former Blue Origin engineers Andy and Tom, is developing the Nova two-stage rocket to achieve full reusability for both orbital stages and drastically reduce launch costs. Backed by nearly $1 billion in funding and operating from a 168,000-square-foot factory in Kent, Washington, the company plans to execute its first orbital launch later this year from Historic Complex 14 in Florida. The team aims to establish daily launch cadence and ubiquitous space access by integrating in-house manufacturing with a proprietary software platform to manage rigorous testing and FAA-regulated operations.
- Y Combinator13 min
Inside The Startup Launching AI Data Centers Into Space
Aaron Epstein, Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, Adi Oltean, Addy
Launched on November 2nd via a SpaceX rideshare mission, aerospace startup StarCloud successfully deployed the first orbital data center, StarCloud One, which houses an NVIDIA H100 GPU to operate 100 times more powerfully than previous space computers. Founded in Summer 2024 by CEO Philip Johnston, Microsoft veteran Addy, and NASA alumnus Ezra, the team rapidly pivoted from solar power concepts to orbital compute to leverage cheaper launch costs for massive, sun-synchronous facilities that utilize deep space for cooling. With a second satellite featuring NVIDIA Blackwell architecture scheduled for October 2025, StarCloud aims to scale to 40-megawatt centers that bypass terrestrial constraints on land and water while validating high-performance workloads like model training in the vacuum.