The orbital data center thesis just became an economics question.
A former AMD VP and an Oxford economist put the megawatt orbital data center thesis through physics and capital-allocation math at SmallSat Europe 2026.
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AI just reached production in European space. The trust problem is what comes next.
AI shipped to production in European space on Day 2 of SmallSat Europe 2026. Ubotica's Aubrey Dunne walked through a deployed maritime ISR use case. Cognitive Space, Telespazio, and Spaceflux put the trust problem on the table. The next procurement question is auditability, not capability. The European vendor that builds the audit layer around the model wins the defence contract.
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Cowboy Raises $275M and Files for 20,000 Orbital Data Centers, Forcing the ODC Thesis Into View
Cowboy Space Corporation, formerly Aetherflux, closed a $275M Series B led by Index Ventures and filed plans for a 20,000-satellite "Stampede" constellation three days later. The largest single capital commitment in orbital compute history lands inside a thesis SatNews has been mapping bottleneck by bottleneck all year. Editor-in-Chief Nick Warfield on what Cowboy actually bet $275M on, and what they have to prove.
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Your anomaly detection isn’t the problem
Decision architecture, not detection accuracy, is where satellite operations actually breaks — and the data is starting to say so out loud.
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Laser Communications and the Rise of Orbital Data Centers
Odysseus Space CEO Jordan Vannitsen argues that laser communication is the missing infrastructure layer that will turn isolated satellite constellations into connected, distributed computing systems in orbit.
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The Fractal Lab – Part III
SatNews Editorial Analysis Before we dream of floating data centers, we must understand why the SmallSat is the only laboratory that matters. Welcome to The Fractal Lab: a three-part series on […]
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Silicon Valley to Aerospace: Code is the New Steel
Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Rockets still make a lot of noise, but the revolution visible at the SmallSat Symposium moves silently, digitally, and at the speed of code. For decades “metal benders”—those massive aerospace conglomerates that first weld titanium and then figure out the flight computer—have defined the space industry. That era is officially obsolete.
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Space Has a Plumbing Problem, and It’s Getting Expensive
Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Rockets function reliably. Satellites roll off assembly lines at scale. Yet the buzz at SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View can’t mask a sobering reality: data gets stuck on the way down.
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The Fractal Lab – Part II
In Part 2 of this series, we examine the second bottleneck facing the Orbital Data Center (ODC) : Data Gravity. We will explore why moving exabytes to and from orbit is harder than processing them, and how this specific constraint fractures the market into two mutually exclusive compute types: the high-speed "Real-Time Reduction Hub" and the massive "Batch Trainer." We will also examine other computing challenges unique to space.
Read MoreThe Fractal Lab
Before we dream of floating data centers, we must understand why the SmallSat is the only laboratory that matters. Welcome to The Fractal Lab: a three-part series on why orbital computing succeeds or fails first at 10 kilograms, not 10,000.
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