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Starcloud plans its next power moves for AI in space

Starcloud's founders in white suits: Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean
Starcloud's founders — Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean — wear protective gear in a clean room. (Starcloud Photo)

After taking one small but historic step for space-based AI, a Seattle-area startup called Starcloud is gearing up for a giant leap into what could be a multibillion-dollar business.

The business model doesn’t require Starcloud to manage how the data for artificial intelligence applications is processed. Instead, Starcloud provides a data-center “box” — a solar-powered satellite equipped with the hardware for cooling and communication — while its partners provide and operate the data processing chips inside the box.

Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston said his company has already worked out a contract along those lines with Denver-based Crusoe Cloud, a strategic partner.

“In the long term, you can think of this more like an energy provider,” he told GeekWire. “We tell Crusoe, ‘We have this box that has power, cooling and connectivity, and you can do whatever you want with that. You can put whatever chip architecture you want in there, and anything else.’ That means we don’t have to pay for the chips. And by far the most expensive part of all this, by the way, is the chips. Much more expensive than the satellite.”

If the arrangement works out the way Johnston envisions, providing utilities in space could be lucrative. He laid out an ambitious roadmap: “The contract is 10 gigawatts of power from 2032 for five years, at 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. That comes to $13.1 billion worth of energy.”

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OpenAI CEO considers exploring the space data frontier

Stoke Space hotfire test of booster engine
Stoke Space’s Zenith booster engine blazes during a hot-fire test in 2024. (Stoke Space Photo)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is thinking about expanding into the final frontier for data centers, and his efforts to follow through on that thought reportedly turned into talks with Stoke Space, a rocket startup headquartered just south of Seattle.

Altman looked into putting together funding to invest in Stoke Space, with an eye toward either forging a partnership or ending up with a controlling stake in the company, according to an account published by The Wall Street Journal. The discussions reportedly began this summer and picked up in the fall, but are said to be no longer active.

Such a move would open up a new front in Altman’s competition with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has talked about scaling up Starlink V3 satellites to serve as data centers for AI applications. “SpaceX will be doing this,” Musk wrote in a post to his X social-media platform.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the Blue Origin space venture, has voiced a similar interest in orbital data centers — as has Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google is partnering with Planet Labs on a space-based data processing effort known as Project Suncatcher.

The tech world’s appetite for data processing and storage is being driven by the rapidly growing resource requirements of artificial intelligence applications. Altman addressed the subject on Theo Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast in July.

“I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time,” Altman said. “But I don’t know, because maybe we put them in space. Like, maybe we build a big Dyson sphere on the solar system and say, ‘Hey, it actually makes no sense to put these on Earth.’”

Citing unidentified sources, the Journal said Altman has been exploring the idea of investing in space ventures to follow through on that thought. Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space, which is working on a fully reusable rocket called Nova, reportedly became a focus of his interest.

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Fiction Science Club

Dictators weaponize new technologies in fact and fiction

Illustration: Huge eye formed from ones and zeros
Surveillance tools and artificial intelligence are making life easier for Big Brother. (BigStock Illustration / Valery Brozhinsky)

When Ray Nayler began writing his science-fiction novel about a repressive regime powered by artificial intelligence, he didn’t expect the story to be as timely as it turned out to be. He really wishes it wasn’t.

“This is not a world that I think we should want to live in, and I would love it if it is a world that we completely avoid, and if the book seems in 10 to 20 years to be extraordinarily naive in its predictions,” Nayler says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

Nayler’s new novel, “Where the Axe Is Buried,” draws upon his experience working on international development in Russia and other former Soviet republics for the Peace Corps and the U.S. Foreign Service. “I added it up, and I’ve spent over a decade in authoritarian states,” he says. “And so I have, fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of experience with this problem.”

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GeekWire

Starcloud raises another $10M for data centers in space

Illustration: Starcloud data center being assembled in orbit
An artist’s conception shows data-center spacecraft being added to an orbital array. (Starcloud via YouTube)

Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud got its start just last year under a different name — Lumen Orbit — but the newly renamed company is already filling out its seed funding round with $10 million in fresh investment for space-based data centers.

The new influx of capital comes after December’s announcement that the startup brought in $11 million from investors including NFX, Y Combinator (or YC, for short), FUSE, Soma Capital and scout funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. Starcloud graduated from Y Combinator’s summer cohort last year.

The additional funding comes from previous seed investors and several new venture capital firms in the form of a simplified agreement for future equity, or SAFE. If you add up the $11 million and the $10 million, “it can be thought of as a $21M seed, which is one of the highest-ever seed rounds for a company coming out of YC,” Philip Johnston, Starcloud’s CEO and one of its founders, told GeekWire in an email. Johnston said Starcloud doesn’t intend to identify the new investors until a Series A funding round takes place.

Starcloud’s big idea is to place a network of megawatt-scale computer servers in Earth orbit, powered by grids of solar panels that could stretch as much as 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in width. Such space-based facilities would offer alternatives to terrestrial data centers that are taking up increasing amounts of territory, gobbling up increasing amounts of power, and stirring up increasing levels of controversy.

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NASA and Microsoft team up on AI guide to Earth data

Screenshot of Earth Copilot interface with image of hurricane
A screenshot shows Earth Copilot in action, guiding a computer user to data about Hurricane Harvey. (Image via Microsoft)

Microsoft and NASA have joined forces to develop Earth Copilot, a software tool that uses artificial intelligence and cloud computing to simplify the process of searching and analyzing Earth science data.

The collaboration is part of NASA’s Transform to Open Science Initiative, which aims to make more than 100 petabytes of satellite imagery and other Earth science data more readily available to scientists, educators, policymakers and the general public.

“The vision behind this collaboration was to leverage AI and cloud technologies to bring Earth’s insights to communities that have been underserved, where access to data can lead to tangible improvements,” Minh Nguyen, Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft, said today in a blog posting about the project. “By enabling users to interact with the data through simple, plain language queries, we’re helping to democratize access to spaceborne information.”

Tyler Bryson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for U.S. health and public sector industries, said Earth Copilot lets users interact with NASA’s data repository conversationally.

Bryson noted that the sheer scale and complexity of the information gathered for NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program can sometimes make finding the right information a daunting task. Earth Copilot doesn’t require users to navigate highly technical interfaces or master the intricacies of geospatial analysis.

“Instead, they can simply ask questions such as ‘What was the impact of Hurricane Ian in Sanibel Island?’ or ‘How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect air quality in the U.S.?’” Bryson said. “AI will then retrieve relevant datasets, making the process seamless and intuitive.”

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How artificial intelligence is taking over the final frontier

Photoillustration: Robonaut 2 and spacesuit for human astronaut
Robonaut 2 (at left) was one of NASA’s early forays into the world of robotics and AI. (NASA Photo)

Will intelligent AI agents take on the job of capsule communicator in future missions to the moon, Mars and other space destinations?

It could happen, says James Burk, the executive director of the Mars Society.

“One of our advisers did a really deep dive on how the Apollo astronauts interacted with each other and with the CapCom back on Earth, and he came to the insight that the Apollo 17 astronauts were using CapCom almost like an AI bot — because the CapCom knew everything,” Burk said during a panel discussion focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence and space ventures.

“You can imagine having an AI edge device which could be like a rover following the crew around, walking around the moon or Mars,” he said. “It’s watching them and taking stock of how everyone’s doing.”

This week’s panel was a crossover session presented at Madrona Venture Labs by the Washington Technology Industry Association for Seattle AI Week, and by Space Northwest for Seattle Space Week. “When you think about the kinds of megatrends of our time, two of the big ones are space and AI,” said Mike Doyle, Space Northwest’s president and co-founder.

Putting AI into space adventures isn’t exactly a new idea: The best-known sci-fi example is HAL, the AI who goes psycho in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There’s also the no-nonsense computer voice in the Star Trek saga, or Marvin the Paranoid Android in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

But the real world isn’t science fiction. Yet.

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Lumen Orbit raises $2.4M to put data centers in space

Illustration: Lumen Orbit satellite in space
An artist’s conception shows Lumen Orbit’s satellite in space. (Lumen Orbit Illustration)

Bellevue, Wash.-based Lumen Orbit, a startup that’s only about three months old, says that it’s closed a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round to launch its plan to put hundreds of satellites in orbit, with the goal of processing data in space before it’s downloaded to customers on Earth.

The investors include Nebular, Caffeinated Capital, Plug & Play, Everywhere Ventures, Tiny.vc, Sterling Road, Pareto Holdings and Foreword Ventures. There are also more than 20 angel investors, including four Sequoia Scouts investing through the Sequoia Scout Fund. “The round was 3x oversubscribed,” Lumen CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston told GeekWire in an email.

Johnston is a former associate at McKinsey & Co. who also co-founded an e-commerce venture called Opontia. Lumen’s other co-founders are chief technology officer Ezra Feilden, whose resume includes engineering experience at Oxford Space Systems and Airbus Defense and Space; and chief engineer Adi Oltean, who worked as a software engineer at SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond, Wash.

“We started Lumen with the mission of launching a constellation of orbital data centers for in-space edge processing,” Oltean explained in an email. “Essentially, other satellites will send our constellation the raw data they collect. Using our on-board GPUs, we will run AI models of their choosing to extract insights, which we will then downlink for them. This will save bandwidth downlinking large amounts of raw data and associated cost and latency.”

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How satellites and AI work together to monitor the planet

Screengrab of global imagery map from Satlas
Satlas’ AI modeling software improves satellite image resolution by a factor of four. (AI2 / Satlas Image)

Geospatial data analysis promises to revolutionize the way agriculture, urban planning and disaster relief is done — and thanks to a variety of projects that make use of artificial intelligence, Microsoft and Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI are part of that revolution.

The Allen Institute for AI, also known as AI2, recently rolled out Satlas, a new software platform for exploring global geospatial data generated from satellite imagery. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s AI for Good Lab is working with public and private institutions in Colombia on Project Guacamaya, which uses AI tools to monitor and understand conditions in the Amazon Rainforest.

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How data analysis is done on an orbiting satellite

Illustration: D-Orbit ION satellite in orbit
An artist’s conception shows D-Orbit’s ION spacecraft deploying smaller satellites. (D-Orbit Illustration)

For the past 10 months, Amazon Web Services has been running data through its cloud-based software platform on what’s arguably the world’s edgiest edge: a satellite in low Earth orbit.

The experiment, revealed today during AWS’ re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, is aimed at demonstrating how on-orbit processing can help satellite operators manage the torrents of imagery and sensor data generated by their spacecraft.

“Using AWS software to perform real-time data analysis onboard an orbiting satellite, and delivering that analysis directly to decision makers via the cloud, is a definite shift in existing approaches to space data management,” Max Peterson, AWS’ vice president of worldwide public sector, said today in a blog posting. “It also helps push the boundaries of what we believe is possible for satellite operations.”

AWS’ experiment was done in partnership with D-Orbit, an Italian-based company that focuses on space logistics and transportation; and with Unibap, a Swedish company that develops AI-enabled automation solutions for space-based as well as terrestrial applications.

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How ‘Big Data’ can help scientists focus the search for E.T.

Gaia spacecraft
Artwork shows the Gaia spacecraft against the background of the Milky Way. (ESA Illustration / D. Ducros)

Could far-off aliens be sending out signals telling us they exist? If so, how would we know where to look? Researchers focusing on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, have laid out a new strategy for focusing their quest.

The strategy applies simple trigonometry to millions of data points, with the aim of seeking out potential interstellar beacons that are synchronized with hard-to-miss astronomical phenomena such as supernovae.

University of Washington astronomer James Davenport and his colleagues lay out the plan in a research paper submitted to the arXiv pre-print server this month. The idea is also the subject of a talk that Davenport’s giving this week at the Breakthrough Discuss conference in California.

“I think the technique is very straightforward. It’s dealing with triangles and ellipses, things that are like high-school geometry, which is sort of my speed,” Davenport told GeekWire half-jokingly. “I like simple shapes and things I can calculate easily.”

The pre-print paper, which hasn’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, draws upon data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia sky-mapping mission. But Davenport said the technique is tailor-made for the terabytes of astronomical data that will be coming from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory nightly when it goes online, a couple of years from now.

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