Building a data center in space is hard enough. Orbital is doing it across an ocean too.
Orbital, an LA-based orbital data center startup, announced today it has selected German satellite manufacturer Reflex Aerospace as the exclusive platform partner for Orbital-1—the first satellite in a planned constellation of up to 100,000.
Under the exclusive design-and-development deal, Reflex will bring the “brains” of the spacecraft—its flight-tested bus—freeing Orbital’s engineers to focus on the compute payload, targeting a 2028 launch. Each satellite will pair large solar arrays and radiators with a stack of GPUs, built to run a full Nvidia Vera Rubin rack and cooled by space itself.
“Space is the only place we can scale compute,” Orbital founder and CEO Euwyn Poon told Payload. “On Earth, we’re all competing for the same resources, and we’re quickly tapping out.”
Foreign exchange: The two companies were introduced by a shared backer—Human Element—and bonded over engineering philosophy during a trip to Germany. The deal also makes Orbital the first US customer for Reflex.
“We’re seeing this landscape as truly a global one,” Poon said. “We’re looking to pursue partnerships with different sovereigns around the world.”
Poon frames the transatlantic partnership as the first piece of a deliberately global build, with Southeast Asian manufacturing partners also on the docket.
Power creep: Orbital is more than doubling its per-satellite power target, from ~100 kW to ~250 kW. That is the peak Poon cites for a full Nvidia Vera Rubin rack, and it matches SpaceX’s AI1, which features a peak computing payload of up to 250 kW.
“It didn’t make sense to aim well below the watermark that becomes the benchmark in the next couple years,” Poon said.
Small ball: ODCs are becoming a crowded, well-funded field. Starcloud raised $250M at a $2.3B valuation, and SpaceX and Blue Origin have filed paperwork to launch their own large constellations.
“It’s super clear to me that the future of this space is relatively small satellites, and a constellation of a large number of them,” Poon said.
Orbital’s edge, according to Poon, is design and cost, including:
- Using commercial–grade parts, such as silicon solar cells over pricier space-grade panels;
- Building with an automotive-style mass production line, rather than today’s hand-built satellites.
Launch limbo: Like most of the field, Orbital is banking on SpaceX’s Starship for cost effective rides to orbit—though Poon says the design isn’t Starship-dependent. He believes that the best design will win the launch slots. “If we do that, the lanes should clear for us to secure launch at economical cost.”
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