Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites
‘Project Sunrise’ needs a network that doesn’t exist, a rocket that’s hardly flown, and FCC approval
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has applied to launch up to 51,600 datacenter satellites.
A Thursday filing argues that the US Federal Communications Commission should approve Blue Origin’s plans because “insatiable demand for AI workloads” means orbiting servers represent “a complement to terrestrial infrastructure by introducing a new compute tier that operates independently of Earth-based constraints.”
Blue Origin also argues that datacenters in space will “enable U.S. companies developing and using AI to flourish, accelerating breakthroughs in machine learning, autonomous systems, and predictive analytics in support of broad societal benefit.”
But the company says it will be hard to build all the AI infrastructure we need on Earth.
“Space-based datacenters can help break this bottleneck,” the company claims. “The built-in efficiencies of solar-powered satellites, always-on solar energy, lack of land or displacement costs, and nonexistent grid infrastructure disparities, fundamentally lower the marginal cost of compute capacity compared to terrestrial alternatives.”
Those claims are hotly contested on grounds that the technology for orbiting datacenters doesn’t exist and will likely be unreliable and therefore impractical.
Blue Origin wants to build orbiting datacenters anyway and says its planned “Project Sunrise” will see it launch “up to 51,600 satellites operating in sun-synchronous orbits from 500–1,800 km, with inclinations between 97 degrees and 104 degrees, with each orbital plane containing approximately 300–1,000 satellites.”
The company says it will use optical links to connect satellites to each other and rely on another of its planned projects – the TeraWave space broadband service – to connect to terra firma.
Blue Origin has yet to launch a single TeraWave satellite and has only flown the New Glen rocket it plans to use for datacenter satellite launches twice. The filing says the company plans to launch the first of its planned 5,000-plus TeraWave orbiters before the end of 2027.
Much of the filing concerns the spectrum Project Sunrise will use to communicate, and how its plans won’t inconvenience any other stakeholders.
But it also points out that Blue Origin hasn’t filed documentation with the International Telecommunications Union, which also has a say in these matters.
Project Sunrise is therefore likely a long way over the horizon.
The Register suggests it may lose its name before it launches, as Australian airline Qantas uses the same moniker for its plan to fly non-stop from Sydney and Melbourne to New York and London, journeys that will take around 20 hours. ®