Four things we’d need to put data centers in space
Four things we’d need to put data centers in space
Publish Date: 2026-04-03 13:03:00
Source Domain: www.technologyreview.com
Large structures with hundreds of square meters of solar arrays would quickly suffer damage from small pieces of space debris and meteorites, which would over time degrade the performance of their solar panels and create more debris in orbit. Operating one million satellites in low Earth orbit, the region of space at the altitude of up to 2,000 kilometers, might be impossible to do safely unless all satellites in that area are part of the same network so they can communicate effectively to maneuver around each other, Greg Vialle, the founder of the orbital recycling startup Lunexus Space, told MIT Technology Review.
“You can fit roughly four to five thousand satellites in one orbital shell,” Vialle says. “If you count all the shells in low Earth orbit, you get to a number of around 240,000 satellites maximum.”
And spacecraft must be able to pass each other at a safe distance to avoid collisions, he says.
“You also need to be able to get stuff up to higher orbits and back down to de-orbit,” he adds. “So you need to have gaps of at least 10 kilometers between the satellites to do that safely. Mega-constellations like Starlink can be packed more tightly because the satellites communicate with each other. But you can’t have one million satellites around Earth unless it’s a monopoly.”
On top of that, Starlink would likely want to regularly upgrade its orbiting data centers with more modern technology. Replacing a million satellites perhaps every five years would mean even more orbital traffic—and it could increase the rate of debris reentry into Earth’s atmosphere from around three or four pieces of junk a day to about one every three minutes, according to a group of astronomers who filed objections against SpaceX’s FCC application. Some scientists are concerned that reentering debris could damage the ozone layer and alter Earth’s thermal balance.
Economical launch and assembly
The longer hardware survives in orbit, the better…
