Low Earth orbit is undergoing the fastest expansion in its history. However, the nature of the payload is changing. We are moving past simple “bent-pipe” communication relays — where a satellite simply receives a signal and beams it back to Earth without processing it. With initiatives like StarCloud deploying and training a large language model in orbit, the era of the space data center has arrived. Broadband constellations and on-orbit processing missions are now multiplying faster than their underlying data-handling architectures can evolve.
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