SpaceX has filed an ambitious application with the FCC to launch and orbit 1 million new satellites. The filing was dated January 30th. The new fleet, if approved, would orbit at between 500 and 2,000 kms altitude and be spaced 50 kms apart from one another. Each satellite would be equipped with laser links for communication.

SpaceX says in its filing: “Launching a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilisation—one that can harness the Sun’s full power-while supporting Al-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future amongst the stars.”

SpaceX plans to design and operate different versions of satellite hardware to optimise operations across orbital shells. SpaceX says demand from AI, machine learning and edge computing is growing faster than terrestrial infrastructure can handle.

Moreover, while satellites can freely tap into the sun’s solar power, the freezing cold also dissipates a craft’s heat and with no water or massive cooling infrastructure needed and thus massive cost savings when compared to ground-based data centres.

System will rely nearly exclusively on high-bandwidth optical links for communications. These optical links will route traffic within the network and to satellites in the Starlink constellation, via its high capacity (petabit) and high reliability laser mesh, which in turn will transmit traffic to authorised earth stations on the ground.

The application suggests that SpaceX will need its own fleet of massive Starship giant rockets to deliver the craft. The FCC filing says: “With Starship’s ability to deliver unprecedented tonnage to orbit for AI compute, the capacity for intelligence processing in space could surpass the electricity consumption of the entire US economy, without the immense cost and disruption of rebuilding Earth’s strained electrical grid to support the explosive demand for data centers. In turn, satellites that function as solar-powered orbital data centers are the most cost-effective, energy-efficient, and environmentally sound way to build infrastructure to meet accelerating demand for Al-enabled goods and services.”

“With the inherent efficiencies of deploying solar powered data centers and launch cost rapidly decreasing due to the development of the Starship launch vehicle, SpaceX will be able to cost- effectively scale up its constellation as demand increases and compute evolves. For instance, launching 1 million tonnes per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per tonne would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with minimal ongoing operational or maintenance needs,” the filing adds.

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Categories: AI, Articles, Broadband, Business, Policy, Regulation, Satellite

Tags: FCC, spacex, starlink, starship