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Axiom sees military applications for orbiting computing capacity.
COLORADO SPRINGS—Axiom Space plans to launch two Orbital Data Centers before the end of the year contained as payloads within satellites that are part of Kepler Communications’ laser relay network.
The company designed the payloads to provide on-orbit data storage, processing and artificial intelligence services, it said April 7 here at the Space Symposium.
“This innovative approach not only reduces reliance on Earth-based systems and enhances resiliency and security of emerging mesh networks in orbit, but also enhances real-time operations of space assets by providing lower latency and higher availability cloud capabilities,” Axiom Space says.
Axiom Space sees the Orbital Data Centers as having several defense applications, such as rapidly fusing data from ground and space sensors about potential threats. The company says the computing centers could also run machine learning or large language models to enable satellites to make autonomous or semi-autonomous decisions in real time.
In addition to defense applications, the Orbital Data Centers have potential commercial use cases, Axiom Space says. The company announced in 2023 that it planned to install an Orbital Data Center inside its commercial space station—the Axiom Station. That computing center would help processes data for payloads on the space station, such as microgravity research, and would also be connected to Kepler’s laser communications relay network in low Earth orbit.
Free-flying Orbital Data Center Nodes 1 and 2 are to be launched as part of Kepler’s first tranche of optical data relay satellites, scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2025 and consisting of nine satellites and a spare in Sun-synchronous orbit. That laser communications network is designed to transfer 2.5 Gbps of data across a link between satellites, and can also downlink via laser or radio frequency connections data to Earth. It is to be compatible with the Space Development Agency’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture military constellation.
“We plan to integrate emerging 10 Gbps [plus optical inter-satellite links] and space-to-ground optical communications capabilities into our future Orbital Data Center nodes, as they become available to facilitate connections to more satellites, more constellations, more ground sites, and ultimately [terabits per second]-worth of data flow in the foreseeable future,” says Jason Aspiotis, global director of in-space data and security with Axiom Space.
Axiom Space says it has options to purchase additional slots for its Orbital Data Centers in Kepler’s laser relay constellation. Kepler is selling edge-computing payload spots in its network to other potential clients as well.
Kepler also is working on a second tranche of LEO relay satellites to be launched in about two years as part of the European Space Agency’s High Throughput Optical Network, an all-optical, multi-orbit laser communications network with terabit per second capacity.
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