The volume of data generated in space is increasing every day, and the concept of orbital data centers to handle it is receiving considerable attention. At a HUB session during ASCEND this week, The Aerospace Corporation’s Kelley Litzner presented and fielded questions on this hot tech topic.
Though the technical difficulties of hosting serious compute and storage capacity on orbit are significant to say the least, the benefits of even a limited deployment are clear, Litzner explained.
“Especially when we get to the Moon or Mars, you’re going to need some sort of on-orbit compute and analysis that doesn’t have the latency from going back to Earth,” he said. “And deep space missions as well as in-space assembly and manufacturing, we don’t want to have to go back to ground stations and then come all the way back up for the compute and capabilities that we need.”
The challenges are clear and largely undisputed: power, heat dissipation, and the sheer mass of the hardware ensure that orbital data centers are not competitive with terrestrial ones, but rather a specialized companion service for space-based needs.
Litzner answered audience questions on a variety of topics, from where the capital would come from to build these facilities to how they might share architectures with terrestrial systems. But one concept that came up repeatedly was the necessity of starting work soon despite a challenging near-term economic case.
“The closer you get to the Earth, the harder it is to justify — but that’s where you’re going to test your capability,” he explained. “These next couple of years are going to be a really big part of testing what’s possible, what makes sense, where the economics play in, and then what that looks like in progression over the next five, ten, and twenty years.”
