Photo: Leonardo Rizzi, Creative Commons
In the modern world, data centers are everywhere. They house the IT infrastructure for building, running, and delivering applications and services over the Internet and also through private networks such as the ones that corporations have for their employees. This website — and almost every other website in existence — resides in a data center somewhere, where it is maintained and monitored by the folks that Florida Media Now has engaged to provide that service. “The cloud” is another term we use for data centers — your email, photo backups, and so forth are all in a data center too. And now, data centers are starting to move to orbit.
Photo: Spacecom Expo 2024
Jason Aspiotis, Axiom Space’s Director of In-Space Infrastructure & Logistics, says this only makes sense as the space economy grows. “Earth’s orbital economy is evolving with the proliferation of thousands of commercial, U.S. government, and allied satellites addressing needs in Earth observation, next generation communications, positioning, and navigation, space domain awareness, and security.”
Axiom Space is a leader in this field, and is a diverse company currently working on building a commercial space station, as well as other activities such as fabricating lunar EVA suits for Artemis astronauts to use on the moon, private missions to the International Space Station, LASER-based space communications, even next-generation optical fiber made in space that will dramatically increase the bandwidth and throughput of digital communications back here on Earth. They are an emerging technological leader in the space sector, and as part of their activities, managing and providing data services to space stations and satellites is a natural exension of what they are doing as a company.
Axiom Space Leads The Way
Aspiotis says “Axiom Space is developing scalable orbital data center infrastructure to primarily support [the] growing population of satellites and spacecraft in Earth’s orbit with in-space cloud computing and data storage; artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML); and cybersecurity. The orbital data center infrastructure will also support Axiom Station operations, crew, research payloads, and in-space manufacturing.”
Data centers co-located near those orbital facilities makes sense, according to Aspiotis. “The value proposition of orbital data centers is centered on four pillars,” he said. “Latency for applications where every millisecond counts; mitigating data bottlenecks between space and Earth, especially for new generations of high data volume sensors; increasing the resiliency of emerging mesh networks in space; and increasing the cybersecurity of space infrastructure.”
Beyond Orbit
And beyond Earth orbit? “A fifth pillar emerges as humanity expands exploration and economic development in Cislunar space and the Moon’s surface, and beyond toward Mars; the further away from Earth we operate, the more in-situ cloud computing capabilities will be required to support those operations.”
Unlike some companies that are creating purpose-built orbital computing platforms, Axiom’s philosophy is to use existing Earth-based computing hardware. “Our plan is to use terrestrial hardware to leverage both state of the art CPU or GPU technologies and the unit economics of gear used in Earth-based DCs,” Aspiotis says.
He added that there is an inherent advantage to this philosophy. “The hardware will be heavier and larger than purpose-built equipment, but with higher performance capabilities. at a reduced cost. Moreover, we foresee launch costs continuing to come down with the advent of more heavy launch capabilities from multiple launch providers in the next five years.”
Going To Orbit Is Getting Cheaper
Aspiotis makes a good point. As more launch providers complete launch systems of varying size and capability, the price per kilogram to orbit has dropped drastically and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. According to Nodir Adilov of Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne and other researchers, from 2000 to 2020 per-kilogram launch costs decreased at an average annual rate of 5.5%, and within about twenty years, the cost to orbit will drop below $1000 per kilogram.
Those estimates may turn out to a wildly conservative. Elon Musk has targeted an orbital launch cost of $10/kg for SpaceX’s Starship, and even if Musk’s target comes in at five times higher, that’s only $50/kg. In short, the cost of sending hardware to orbit is falling steadily, and if Starship achieves even most of its promise, the cost may reach a cliff and fall drastically.
Testing On ISS
Photo: NASA
Axiom plans to test their new designs on ISS this year. “We plan to fly and install an Axiom Data Center Unit (AxDCU) prototype onboard the ISS,” Aspiotis says. That prototype will “Test and demonstrate use cases for in-space cloud computing, AI/ML, data fusion and cybersecurity applications. The primary objectives are: (a) continue to develop the orbital data center market by demonstrating and proving the efficacy of in-situ cloud computing use cases, and (b) raise the technical readiness level of commercial and terrestrial-grade hardware operating in a space station environment.”
As Axiom completes its ODC development, the company sees a good market for its services, “Any terrestrial company that could stand to benefit from space-derived data or insights being processed and delivered with lower latency and more security could be a user of ODCs. Financial institutions requiring faster insights from Earth observation data could be an example,” said Aspiotis.
Working Together
Other companies, such as Japan’s NTT, are also working in this field. Interoperability will be vital. “The U.S. DoD Space Development Agency is pushing optical communications interoperability standards that are starting to be adopted by the U.S. government, allied, and commercial space infrastructure. This communications interoperability will enable satellites and orbital data center infrastructure to be interoperable.”
Interoperability is of great interest to the Department of Defense and was part of the basis for the creation of the Internet in the 1960s and during its subsequent developmental years. Standards were set early, ensuring that disparate computing systems could communicate, and using those standards, the Internet we know today emerged. That in mind, it makes sense for standards to be at the forefront of space-based computing.
Environmental Advantages
There are also other benefits ODCs — they could mitigate problems that terrestial data centers create. For example, power usage. In 2022, data centers consumed 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity globally, which could rise to over 1,000 TWh by 2026. That’s a lot of power on an already-strained terrestrial grid. Space-based data centers would be independent of the grid, of course, and could harvest power through solar panels, or other sources. Aspiotis said that, “Thales Alenia in Europe is studying large-scale space data centers as a potential solution to environmental impacts associated with data center energy consumption on the ground, by migrating the infrastructure to space.”
In conclusion, Aspiotis says, “Axiom Space foresees orbital data centers becoming a long-term solution to offloading energy consumption on Earth. As launch costs continue to come down, and ISAM capabilities become more common place, the ability to construct and operate large-scale orbital data centers will be possible. Perhaps, orbiting space-based solar power facilities could be dual-used as orbital data center platforms: instead of beaming power to the Earth, consume the power in the orbital data center and beam data to and from Earth.”
