Computing in Orbit: What Will It Take to Build this Next Infrastructure Layer?
Day: Thursday 8 October
Time: 17:05 - 17:35
Location: D3 - NEST Congress and Exhibition Centre
Orbital computing is moving from individual demonstrations toward something much more ambitious: an interconnected infrastructure layer spanning compute, communications, spacecraft, power, launch, data services, and national security. But getting there requires solving more than any single technical problem. This panel brings together leaders building across the emerging orbital computing stack to examine what it will actually take to operate compute at scale in space.
How should compute, power, thermal management, communications, and spacecraft architectures evolve together? Where should processing happen across satellites, constellations, and ground infrastructure? How do optical networks and increasingly capable spacecraft change what can be done in orbit? And what technical and operational bottlenecks remain?
The discussion will also explore interoperability, resilience, autonomy, cybersecurity, launch and deployment, and the growing intersection between commercial and national security requirements. Rather than asking whether data centers can be built in space, this panel asks the harder question: What infrastructure, partnerships, standards, and capabilities have to come together to make orbital computing work at meaningful scale?
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