Orbital files plans for 100,000 orbital data centers
TAMPA, Fla. — Five-month-old startup Orbital has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to deploy up to 100,000 data center satellites, aiming to bring 10 gigawatts of computing power from space to meet rising artificial intelligence demand.
The filings submitted June 24 add a few more details for a constellation the Los Angeles-based venture first outlined earlier this month, when it emerged from stealth with $5 million in pre-seed funding ahead of a demonstration mission next year.
They include plans to deploy 100-kilowatt-class satellites in low Earth orbit at altitudes of 500-850 kilometers, with solar arrays and radiators spanning around 100 meters and a dry mass of 1.5-2.5 metric tons.
Similar to orbital data center plans filed earlier this year by Starcloud and Cowboy Space, the startup said the primary data path for its Orbital Datacenter System would rely on optical intersatellite links with third-party constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink.
Orbital CEO and founder Euwyn Poon, an electric scooter entrepreneur who founded micromobility company Spin and later sold it to Ford, described the filing as a first regulatory step as it finalizes satellite design.
“The demonstrating payload is going to be a very, very scaled down version of what we’re looking to do with a single GPU,” he said, “maybe one one hundredth the size.”
However, he said the venture is aiming to design Orbital-1, its first purpose-built orbital compute satellite slated for 2028, to be as close to the 100-kilowatt-class operational spacecraft as possible, although the full constellation would likely not be deployed until well into the next decade.
Performance could be bumped up as Orbital enters final design, Poon added, as Starcloud targets 200 kilowatts for satellites in its proposed 88,000-strong constellation. SpaceX has outlined 150-kilowatt-class orbital data centers after filing plans for up to a million of them.
Entering the fray
Blue Origin and others are also pursuing similar constellations as terrestrial data centers face mounting power, cooling and land constraints. Poon said the emerging orbital data center market remains relatively sparse, but that now is the time to coordinate how these large systems would coexist.
“I come from the micro mobility industry, building infrastructure for cities, and at the outset of that, we had several companies very reminiscent of what’s happening now [with] trying to build out large fleets — and in our case now large constellations,” he said, “and the question is really, how are we going to start sorting this out from a space management standpoint in space?”
Poon said he brings 10 years of manufacturing experience to the challenge, and the team of six he has assembled so far for Orbital brings expertise from SpaceX, Amazon and Northrop Grumman.
An orbital data center is a relatively simple system at its core, he said, compared with a communications network such as Starlink that requires more complex antennas and networking payloads.
“The complexity is all launch,” he said, as Orbital joins Starcloud and others waiting on SpaceX’s Starship to be ready in coming years to get their massive constellations in orbit.
“The rest of it is first principles physics and manufacturing,” Poon added. “I mean solar panels, radiators and electronics — the added complexity is that you’re operating in a vacuum and … there’s radiation you need to shield against, but solvable.”
Manufacturing is a skill on its own, he continued, along with managing different vendors, supply chains and refining design for manufacturability.
“It’s actually a unique skill in this space,” he said, “because traditionally satellites have been more of a bespoke, one-of-one type build.”
Poon compared the challenge to lessons Spin learned while designing electric scooters, where early iterations with non-removable batteries required workers to bring them back for charging. Adding swappable batteries to later generations simplified operations, improving efficiency and profitability.
He said Orbital could see similar gains across successive generations of orbital compute spacecraft, where even small design changes could have an outsized effect when scaled across a 100,000-satellite constellation.
Although Orbital is designing the core satellite platform in-house from Los Angeles, Poon said the venture is also looking to work with manufacturing partners and is exploring broader collaboration opportunities.
