A five-month-old Los Angeles startup called Orbital has asked US regulators for permission to do something that seems almost unbelievable: launch up to 100,000 satellites into space, each one serving as a data center powering artificial intelligence.
As SpaceNews reports on the filing, the company filed its application with the FCC on June 24, 2026, with the goal of bringing 10 gigawatts of computing power from space to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence. The filing follows the Los Angeles-based project emerging from stealth earlier the same month with $5 million in seed funding, ahead of a demonstration mission planned for next year.
What Orbital actually proposed to build
According to the same SpaceNews report, Orbital’s filing outlines plans to deploy 100-kilowatt-class satellites in low Earth orbit at altitudes of 500 to 850 kilometers, each equipped with solar arrays and radiators extending about 100 meters and a dry mass of 1.5 to 2.5 metric tons.
Similar to orbital data center plans presented earlier in the year by other companies, including Starcloud and Cowboy Space, Orbital said the primary data path for the proposed orbital data center system would rely on optical links between satellites with external constellations, such as SpaceX’s Starlink.
Why is computing power moving into space at all?
Orbital CEO and founder Euwyn Poon, who previously founded electric scooter company Spin before selling it to Ford, described orbital data centers as relatively straightforward systems built on solar panels, radiators and electronics, though he noted that they must also operate in the vacuum of space and withstand radiation.
The broader appeal of moving computing to orbit is to avoid some of the biggest limitations facing data centers built on Earth, as space provides continuous solar power and a cool natural environment without the land and water required by a terrestrial facility.
Why is launch, not construction, the real bottleneck?
Building satellites on a large scale will be one of the company’s biggest challenges, Boone said, describing the orbital data centers themselves as fairly simple systems while noting that all the complexity lies in the launch, noting the importance of heavy launch vehicles for deploying constellations of this size.
According to SpaceNews, Orbital is among several companies waiting for SpaceX spacecraft to become available before large orbital computing networks can realistically be deployed on a large scale.
How Orbital’s plans compare to the broader industry
Orbital’s proposal joins a rapidly crowded field of similar filings over the past year. Boone noted that Starcloud, a competing startup, is targeting 200 kilowatt satellites for its proposed 88,000 spacecraft constellation, an indication that Orbital’s satellite specifications could still be revised upwards as the company finalizes its design.
This wave of activity reflects a broader shift in the industry, moving from early-stage announcements to actual regulatory filings, with many larger companies now pursuing their own orbital computing clusters.
What comes next for Orbital’s ambitious plan?
Orbital is preparing for a demonstration mission for next year, though Poon said the first payload will be much smaller than the hardware planned for future operational satellites, describing it as perhaps a hundredth of the size of a single GPU setup planned for later missions.
The company plans to follow up that demonstration with Orbital-1, its first dedicated satellite, currently scheduled for 2028, which Boone said has been designed to resemble a future production version as closely as possible, though the full constellation is not expected to be deployed until well into the next decade.
Boone also said some specifications could still change before the design is finalized, and that Orbital is looking for manufacturing partners and broader collaboration opportunities while the core satellite platform is designed in-house from Los Angeles.
Why this is really an open question
Boone compared the scale of the challenge to his experience building Spin, where early design choices around interchangeable components made a huge difference in efficiency at scale, suggesting that Orbital could see similar gains across successive generations of its satellites. It’s still truly uncertain whether Orbital and its competitors can solve the launch costs and manufacturing scale needed to make a 100,000-satellite constellation viable, and much of that answer will depend on developments beyond Orbital’s control, particularly how quickly the SpaceX spacecraft becomes a reliable, frequently reusable launch vehicle in the coming years.
