Cowboy Space Corporation told the Federal Communications Commission on May 14 that it wants to fly up to 20,000 satellites in sun-synchronous orbit between 700 and 1,000 kilometers. Each would mass 20 to 25 metric tons, carry just under 800 GPUs on Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin module, and draw a megawatt of usable power. The filing landed three days after the company closed a $275 million Series B. The executive who runs operations and the legal function behind it joins the orbital data center panel on the opening day of Satellite Innovation at Silicon Valley Space Week.
Joseph Yaffe is Chief Operating Officer and Chief Legal Officer of Cowboy Space Corporation. The Baiju Bhatt venture was called Aetherflux until May, when it took the new name and announced its Series B at a $2 billion post-money valuation. Index Ventures led the round, and total disclosed equity now runs to roughly $325 million. Cowboy is building a launch vehicle whose upper stage doubles as the payload, with each stage designed to operate as a one-megawatt data center in orbit and the constellation named Stampede. Yaffe joined in January, when the company was still Aetherflux. He came from Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where he was head of the Palo Alto office, and he spent more than three decades in large-firm practice before that. Cowboy is his first in-house role.
The program calls this the largest capital and engineering story of 2026. The case for orbital data centers is that power is abundant in orbit and that AI compute no longer has to sit next to a terrestrial grid. The case against starts with thermal. Shedding a megawatt of waste heat in vacuum is unsolved, a constellation of that size at that altitude carries real debris exposure, and Cowboy’s own FCC filing concedes the satellite design is not finished. Launch economics sit underneath all of it, with Starship projected to push costs toward $100 per kilogram against roughly $2,700 on Falcon 9. Yaffe holds both the operational and the regulatory halves of that question at one of the companies making the bet.
Yaffe joins “Orbital Data Centers: Investable Infrastructure or Thermodynamic Bet?” on Tuesday, October 27 at 12:15 p.m. He is one of six on stage. The others are Janna Lewis, Senior VP of Policy and General Counsel at Astroscale U.S. Inc.; Jason Aspiotis, CEO and Co-Founder of OwlO Cloud; Rob DeMillo, CEO and Cofounder of Sophia Space; Filip Rezabek, Co-founder and CTO of SpaceComputer; and Dr. Slava Turyshev, Senior Research Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The program sets believers against skeptics on both the engineering and the economics. The session runs 45 minutes in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
Silicon Valley Space Week runs October 27 to 29, with Satellite Innovation taking the first day and a half. Yaffe’s panel is the midday session on day one. Cowboy has targeted its first launch before the end of 2028.
