Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has applied to launch up to a million solar-powered satellites into space to form ‘orbital data centres’ to meet the growing demands of artificial intelligence. The filing was posted on Friday (30th January) with US agency the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The vast scope of the plan, if approved, would dwarf the company’s current Starlink constellation of satellites. This existing network currently consists of more than 9,600 individual satellites, meaning that there could potentially be a hundredfold increase in SpaceX satellites orbiting the planet.
In an eight-page document submitted as part of the filing, SpaceX said that the proposed system would help deliver the computing capacity required “for large scale AI inference and data center applications serving billions of users globally”. It claimed that orbital data centres were the most efficient way of meeting this rising demand as they are able to utilise solar power in space with low operational and maintenance costs once they have been deployed. The company also said that the move would be a step towards establishing a Kardashev II-level civilisation. The Kardashev scale is named after Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, and a theoretical Type II civilisation is one that would be able to harness and consume energy directly from its nearest star.
Proposed data centres would communicate with Starlink via lasers
Providing more details, the document said that the satellites would operate “within narrow orbital shells spanning up to 50 km each”. The individual satellites would orbit the Earth at heights of between 500 km and 2,000 km above the planet’s surface. The orbital data centres would also communicate with Starlink networks using optical links, or lasers. The filing said that the company intended to design and use a range of different satellite hardware models to optimise operations.
The filing did not provide a timeline for the proposals and is likely to come under close scrutiny from the FCC and elsewhere. Reuters suggested that operators sometimes request permission for larger numbers of satellites than they actually intend to deploy, pointing out that SpaceX initially sought approval for 42,000 Starlink satellites. Even if this is the case, a starting point of up to a million units is a huge increase on the number of satellites currently in orbit, with critics already claiming that growing satellite numbers increase the risk of collisions and affect astronomical research.
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