Orbital Compute Taps Reflex Aerospace to Build 100,000-Satellite Space Data Center Constellation

Orbital Compute Inc., a startup developing orbital data centers, has selected German satellite manufacturer Reflex Aerospace as its satellite platform partner under a development agreement to deliver its Orbital-1 constellation, a planned network of 100,000 satellites designed to bring compute capacity into space.

The partnership marks a significant step for Orbital as it seeks to build infrastructure beyond the constraints of terrestrial data centers, which face growing pressure on power, land and water resources. Under the agreement, Reflex will lead integration of the Orbital-1 satellite based on a proven bus design that will become exclusive to Orbital, along with the technologies used across the constellation. Engineering teams from Orbital in Los Angeles will work alongside Reflex's team in Berlin as a single integrated group.

Together, the two companies plan to produce a satellite with power levels approaching 250kW, which Orbital has said will deliver 100kW of compute, totaling up to 10GW across the full 100,000-satellite constellation. "Reflex brings a proven satellite-bus platform and an advanced engineering team capable of adapting it for orbital computing: hundreds of kilowatts of power, substantial heat rejection and volume production designed in from day one," Euwyn Poon, founder and CEO of Orbital, told DCD. "Data center developers are competing for scarce power, land and water. Space offers a path to scale beyond those terrestrial constraints, with abundant solar energy — but capturing that opportunity requires a fundamentally new kind of spacecraft."

Orbital's pathfinder demonstration satellite is intended to fly in 2027, carrying Nvidia's Blackwell chip to test GPU operation, radiation tolerance, thermal performance and data downlink. Poon has previously said the demonstrator would be roughly one one-hundredth the size of the Orbital-1 satellites it is planning. "Our model is to move at maximum speed by working with the best in the world at every layer, from spacecraft platforms to manufacturing to launch," Poon said in a statement. "Reflex, as a proven European platform builder, is a cornerstone of that model, and we're proud to be its first US customer."

The company filed with the Federal Communications Commission for its orbital data center constellation in early July and is still awaiting the regulator's approval. The filing was made just weeks before the FCC voted to overhaul its licensing process into an "assembly line" model with a "presumed acceptable framework" that would grant applications such as Orbital's immediately without the traditional cross-examination process. In mid-June, Orbital closed its pre-seed round, raising $5 million from 15 investors.

The deal underscores a broader push by technology companies to explore space-based computing as an alternative to land-constrained data centers, though significant regulatory, technical and economic hurdles remain before orbital data centers can operate at commercial scale.