Summary

• SpaceX, Blue Origin, Google, Orbital, Starcloud, and Cowboy Space are pursuing competing orbital-computing concepts, with no proposal fully approved by the FCC.
• SpaceX has described a potential constellation of up to 1 million satellites, while Blue Origin and Orbital have proposed constellations of roughly 51,600 and 100,000 satellites, respectively.
• Orbital systems could use near-continuous solar power and avoid some terrestrial grid, land, water, and permitting constraints.
• Heat rejection is a central design problem because orbital hardware must radiate heat rather than use Earth-based air cooling; radiator mass and area directly affect economics.
• Launch capacity and price remain major dependencies, with the largest concepts requiring rapid reusable heavy-lift launches and satellite manufacturing at unprecedented scale.
• Latency, limited communications capacity, radiation, debris, thermal cycling, and difficult repairs favor local, asynchronous, or space-generated workloads over tightly synchronized cloud computing.
• The near-term path is more likely to involve demonstrations and modest deployments than football-field-sized orbital server farms.