Orbital, founded by e-scooter entrepreneur Evin Poon in February 2026 year, attracted 5 million dollars to fund an in-orbit computing demonstration next year. The startup plans to deploy over 100 000 orbital data centers to meet the rapid demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure (NE).
The company will invest part of the funding from the pre-seed round in the initial design of Orbital-1. The launch of this first in-house computing device is scheduled to take place within 2028 year. According to Evin Poon, each serial satellite will have power 100 kilowatt (kW) for calculations under AI load. For comparison, the most powerful commercial satellites, which have been launched so far, generate only 20–30 kW, and the only spacecraft in the class 100 kW was the ISS — a manned station, which has been collected for decades. The startup did not disclose engineering details, such as the mass of the satellite, the size of the solar panels and the area of the radiators, necessary to support a 100 kW orbital computing node.
After the letters Puna, Orbital's ambitious goal of deploying over 100 000 satellites with a total capacity of over 10 ГВт потребує колосальних можливостей для запуску. Проте проєкт масштабується паралельно з розвитком нового покоління важких ракет, тому стартап рухається до своєї мети поетапно. The startup also reported, that future spacecraft will be designed around Vera Rubin's NVIDIA Space-1 class GPU architecture.
For reference: NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture is an advanced AI platform. Vera Rubin's Space-1 module is a specialized version of her, intended for deployment of powerful computing centers and artificial intelligence systems directly in outer space.
Хоча Пун не має досвіду в космосі, він заявив, що збирає команду експертів для розробки технології на Factory-1 — об’єкті складання та тестування супутників. Водночас він зауважив, that the current composition of the Orbital engineering team has the practical skills of large-scale satellite construction and launch of vehicles into orbit, acquired while working at SpaceX companies, Amazon Leo, Vast, Northrop Grumman та Millennium Space Systems.
Source: https://spacenews.com