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.

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