All articles tagged with #orbital computing
Caltech and Sophia Space have patented a cooling system for AI data centers in orbit, enabling solar-powered operation of space-based computing. The concept aims to overcome overheating and energy hurdles to launch orbital data hubs by the early 2030s, joining broader industry interest in satellite data centers despite substantial engineering and power challenges.
Cooling a data centre on Earth can consume 10–30% of its energy budget and requires vast water use; in space there is no air or water, so heat must be dumped as infrared radiation through massive radiator panels. Those radiators become the limiting factor for megawatt-scale data processing in orbit, complicated by solar heating and the need to keep panels large enough to reject heat yet feasible to launch. The European Space Agency has studied orbital data centres (ASCEND), a startup (Starcloud) has launched an AI satellite, and Google is exploring space-based designs, signaling a staged path: begin with small processor counts in orbit, increase power budgets, then deployable radiators, and finally scalable heat rejection—subject to whether radiators can scale without becoming prohibitively large given launch costs.