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Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston has been particularly open about Starcloud’s business model and targeted economics (great for all us space + numbers nerds) through dozens of media interviews and thousands of good ol’ spicy social posts.
The technical challenges to orbital data centers are well understood, and boil down to the following:
Orbital data center competition includes big players like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Sophia Space, Starcloud, Aetherflux, and Axiom. Plus, satellite manufacturing suppliers such as Apex and K2 Space.
In this piece, we open our models to compare the build costs of an orbital data center and a terrestrial data center (inclusive of the delay-driven terrestrial opportunity cost).
Today, we’re kicking off the first analysis article in a four-part report unpacking the economics of orbital data centers.
After only a two months of 2026, this year is already shaping up to be the year of space data centers. In January, SpaceX filed with the FCC for up to 1M satellites (wild). A few days later, Starcloud followed with plans for 88,000 satellites of its own.
