Engineering professors from Penn State analyze the feasibility of orbital data centers, a concept gaining traction as AI drives explosive demand for compute. While space offers abundant solar power and passive radiative cooling, the challenges are formidable: radiation damage to electronics, enormous radiator surface requirements (two football fields per 10MW of waste heat), costly hardware refresh cycles, in-space assembly requirements, latency issues for Earth-based users, and orbital debris risks. SpaceX's announced AI1 Compute Satellite is 100–1,000x less capable than current Earth-based data centers. The authors conclude that early viable use cases will likely be latency-tolerant, space-native workloads like Earth observation processing and satellite operations rather than mainstream cloud computing.
