Blue Origin Seeks Approval for 51,600 Space Data Centers

Blue Origin, the aerospace company backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has filed for approval to support data centers in space. According to its FCC application, Project Sunrise could include up to 51,600 satellites in sun-synchronous orbit.

The data centers will use optical links to support communications through Blue Origin’s planned satellite communications network, TeraWave, itself announced earlier this year.

“Space-based data centers will be a complement to terrestrial infrastructure by introducing a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints,” reads the application.

“The built-in efficiencies of solar-powered satellites, always-on solar energy, lack of land or displacement costs, and nonexistent grid infrastructure disparities, fundamentally lower the marginal cost of compute capacity compared to terrestrial alternatives.”

 Earlier this year, SpaceX filed plans with the FCC to deploy up to one million “orbital data center” satellites. These would link to the company’s existing Starlink network via optical connections, with Starlink relaying data to ground stations through a laser mesh.

Musk has previously said that Starlink’s “space to ground laser links will exceed” TeraWave’s rate of data transfer, which will supposedly support up to 6Tbps. Both Blue Origin and Starlink argue that data centers in space will be cheaper, less onerous from a regulatory perspective, and sidestep existing issues with power infrastructure.

These space hopefuls are joined by a number of smaller companies that also have plans to put data centers into orbit, including Axiom Space, NTT, Ramon.Space, Aetherflux, and Sophia Space, to name but a few.