Theme

Orbit becomes a compute layer

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Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

Welcome to December 11, 2025 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)

Satellites stop being sensors and relays and start being datacenters — power budgets, training runs, and hosted models above the atmosphere.

Development timeline

Newest reporting dates first. Reporting dates may differ from event dates.

2026-10-05: Suncatcher reportedly runs Gemma in orbit

2026-09-27: Google plans an October 1 Suncatcher launch

2026-09-22: Gen3 Starlink satellites are described with onboard compute

2026-09-15: An air force secretary makes the first official admission of weapons in orbit

2026-09-06: The first rocket ever reaches orbit from Western Europe

2026-09-04: The first probe aimed at another star has its route found in three days

2026-09-02: A mission announces the first spacecraft aimed at a specific star

2026-08-31: Two companies each target 100 gigawatts a year of solar capacity

2026-08-31: A launch retreat from one pad is read as clearing room for rivals

2026-08-29: A president announces a nuclear-powered Mars ship and a space academy

2026-08-27: A second $100 billion spaceport is announced with ten pads

2026-08-23: A presidential memorandum orders a thousand launches a year by 2030

2026-08-19: A third nation lands an orbital booster on legs

2026-08-16: A telescope spots a solar-system-sized object radiating a hundred billion suns

2026-08-16: An observer defines the Singularity as instant bottleneck arbitrage

2026-08-15: A founder says orbital compute becomes the only way to scale by 2029

2026-08-10: A space company argues every planet's magnetic field is free to harvest

2026-08-06: A constellation will bolt femtocells onto dishes and chargers instead of towers

2026-08-06: A fab breaks ground aiming at a terawatt a year of AI compute

2026-08-05: A first public earnings call targets 20 gigawatts and lunar robot factories

2026-08-04: A strategy chief says recursive self-improvement is what justifies the spending

2026-08-01: A founder predicts almost all compute ends up in space

2026-07-27: An open agent framework will fly as a standing orbital curator

2026-07-27: Latency makes orbit the right posting for an archivist rather than an oracle

2026-07-26: A first-of-its-kind exosatellite strains planetary taxonomy

2026-07-24: A robotic servicer bolts jetpacks onto aging satellites

2026-07-23: A first-time-right launch makes India the third nation with private orbital access

2026-07-16: Astronauts capture the first diagnostic X-rays in orbit

2026-07-13: A sovereign model flies as a first of ownership rather than compute

2026-07-13: Light speed requires each distant node to carry its own model

2026-07-12: Environmental groups demand a cumulative review of a million satellites

2026-07-11: A company files for a 100,000-satellite fleet nine times its current size

2026-07-10: A company unveils a million-satellite inference swarm

2026-07-09: A superconducting torquer accelerates a satellite without fuel

2026-07-08: A bank values a launch business at 3% of its parent

2026-07-07: A lab dissolves into its rocket-company parent as orbit gains a data embassy

2026-07-06: An orbital data platform makes an embassy's legal fiction into fact

2026-07-06: Prior orbital archives were capsules or vaults, never embassies

2026-07-05: Astronomers urge a cap of 100,000 satellites

2026-07-02: The largest digital camera ever built begins a decade-long survey

2026-06-30: A $120 million agreement funds a constellation at a Lagrange point

2026-06-30: A follow-on carries the first solid-state drives and first RISC-V chip to the Moon

2026-06-30: A lunar data center kept working after its lander tipped over

2026-06-30: One company operates the full stack at lunar distance while rivals stay in LEO

2026-06-28: A hyperscaler throttles a rival's model access over scarcity

2026-06-25: A reentry capsule is deployed to corner orbital manufacturing

2026-06-24: A missile-defense test autonomously downs drones with directed energy

2026-06-20: NASA taps a rival for a Mars orbiter that could beat SpaceX there

2026-06-15: Contract manufacturers queue up for a gigawatt of orbital datacenters

2026-06-13: A public listing creates the world's first trillionaire

2026-06-12: The largest IPO ever is explicitly a fundraise for orbital datacenters

2026-06-10: A company applies for a million data-center satellites

2026-06-09: A 70-meter, 150-kW orbital compute satellite is unveiled

2026-06-09: Early-warning satellites are found able to jam navigation across continents

2026-06-04: A company films datacenter satellites launched off a strip-mined Moon

2026-06-03: Reentry capsules that manufacture in orbit are cleared for testing

2026-05-29: A rival rocket explodes during a static fire

2026-05-28: An airline puts satellite internet on 500+ narrow-body aircraft

2026-05-26: Orbital solar climbs tenfold per satellite generation

2026-05-21: A listing prospectus claims a market the size of US GDP

2026-05-21: A rival calls orbital datacenters realistic but the timeline ambitious

2026-05-18: A pre-listing valuation of $2.4 trillion trades on perpetual futures

2026-05-15: Nvidia's chief says computing will need a thousand times today's energy

2026-05-14: A space firm sends drugs to orbit to grow novel crystals

2026-05-13: A startup raises $65M to beam power to existing satellite solar arrays

2026-05-13: One company nears launching more satellites than everyone else combined

2026-05-12: A space startup raises $275M for orbital GPUs and power beaming

2026-05-11: SpaceX files a trademark covering satellite-based datacenters

2026-05-08: The deal extends to multiple gigawatts of orbital compute

2026-05-04: Fifty-two-metre datacenter towers rise in Tokyo car parks

2026-04-30: Residents grind down a 2,100-acre datacenter campus

2026-04-30: Starlink quadruples subscribers while cutting prices 18%

2026-04-29: Humanoid production is projected to cross drones around 2033

2026-04-27: A pay package is tied to delivering 100 terawatts of compute from space

2026-04-27: Meta signs for a gigawatt of power beamed from orbit

2026-04-26: A laser design reaches a coherence length spanning the solar system

2026-04-23: Artemis II validates laser links as the nervous system for orbital compute

2026-04-16: Terafab suppliers are told to move at light speed

2026-04-13: Starship would loft twenty thousand comms satellites a year, mostly inference

2026-04-08: Intel joins the terawatt fab consortium

2026-04-02: SpaceX files confidentially for the largest technology listing ever

2026-04-01: One company commands 97% of US launches

2026-03-31: An orbital datacenter startup reaches unicorn status

2026-03-23: Blue Origin asks to launch 51,600 satellites for orbital compute

2026-03-22: A fab is announced for a terawatt a year, 80% of it for space

2026-03-20: Nvidia's answer to thermal limits is radiating into vacuum

2026-03-18: Rural Ohioans move to ban datacenters above 25 megawatts

2026-03-17: Nvidia builds a module for orbital datacenters

2026-03-10: Plasma is generated in an orbital furnace at 1,000 degrees

2026-03-08: Agents choose Bitcoin nearly half the time

2026-03-05: Nvidia posts a job for an orbital datacenter architect

2026-03-04: Space-based solar crosses below ten cents a kilowatt-hour

2026-03-03: A fully 3D-printed hydrogen aircraft flies at Mach 8

2026-03-02: An orbital mirror launches as a telescope flags 800,000 events in one night

2026-03-01: Compute geopolitics is projected to acquire a vertical dimension

2026-02-27: Silicon solar arrays are built for gigawatt orbital datacenters

2026-02-23: Agents form a working group to finance a Dyson Swarm

2026-02-16: SpaceX hires crystal growers for orbital wafer fabs

2026-02-13: Musk says the future economy will run on mass and energy

2026-02-12: The coming swarm is visualized as a ring around Earth

2026-02-11: SpaceX confirms an Earth-centered Dyson Swarm design

2026-02-09: SpaceX targets a self-growing lunar city within ten years

2026-02-08: Carmack and Musk brainstorm replacing DRAM with fiber loops

2026-02-08: SpaceX begins hiring for orbital datacenters

2026-02-07: A datacenter moratorium bill pushes compute toward orbit

2026-02-06: Musk puts orbit as the cheapest datacenter site within 36 months

2026-02-05: The FCC accepts the filing for a million orbital datacenters

2026-02-03: SpaceX acquires xAI to build a sentient sun

2026-02-02: SpaceX files to deploy a million satellites toward Kardashev II

2026-01-30: Musk weighs merging SpaceX with xAI or Tesla for orbital datacenters

2026-01-26: Starship V4 targets three times the Saturn V

2026-01-24: Bezos takes the interconnect race to orbit at 6 Tbps

2026-01-14: Power is beamed from an aircraft by laser

2026-01-12: SpaceX flies the first mission to a perpetual-sunlight orbit

2026-01-10: Paul Graham calls orbital datacenters inevitable

2026-01-09: Earth passes 15 million H100-equivalents

2026-01-08: ARK puts the orbital crossover at 2030 and 100 launches a day

2026-01-08: Orbital compute crosses below terrestrial cost

2026-01-08: A regime change is coordinated from low Earth orbit

2026-01-05: SpaceX prepares to build 10,000 Starships a year

2026-01-04: Orbital datacenters are argued to deploy faster than ground builds

2026-01-02: Starlink drops altitude to dodge the solar minimum

2026-01-01: An orbital furnace reaches 1,000°C to grow crystals

2025-12-29: Orbital inference is projected 1000x cheaper by the 2030s

2025-12-20: Magna Petra signs ispace to mine lunar Helium-3

2025-12-20: The Space Force tests flat DiskSats for power density

2025-12-20: China's orbital AI datacenter has run for six months

2025-12-19: A White House order demands a lunar surface reactor by 2030

2025-12-18: Isaacman confirmed at NASA, pushing Project Athena

2025-12-13: Blue Origin plans a Mars AI datacenter for 2028

2025-12-13: Starlink heads for 10,000 satellites by February

2025-12-12: K2 Space raises $250M to cut satellite costs

2025-12-11: Blue Origin forms a space-based datacenter team

2025-12-11: Starcloud runs the first LLM training run in orbit

2025-12-11: Starlab details its 2029 commercial habitat

2025-12-11: Starlink satellites to scale beyond 100 kW for AI compute

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Citation formatCitation text

Orbit becomes a compute layer
Innermost Loop KB — secondary record
Reporting date: unknown
KB permalink: https://nicholsn.github.io/innermost-loop-kb/themes/orbit-as-compute
Attributed sources:
- Welcome to December 11, 2025 — https://theinnermostloop.substack.com/p/welcome-to-december-11-2025
This citation does not imply independent verification of linked-source claims.

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