Episode 9 of NEXUS takes on-prem off-world, exploring the emerging orbital data center (ODC) industry, potential use cases, and technical challenges. Guests Jason Aspiotis of Axiom Space and Leon Alkalai of Sophia Space and Mandala Space Ventures join Aerospace’s Lori Gordon, who has been collaborating with industry leaders for over a year to advance orbital data centers from hype to higher readiness.

Aspiotis emphasized that Axiom’s focus is on enabling space operations first. “What we and others, and I believe Sophia Space, too, are looking at is mostly about how does compute infrastructure first serve in-space operations with near real-time storage, analytics, sense-making in the context of national security, civil and commercial use cases,” he said. Axiom launched two prototype ODC nodes in January 2025 in collaboration with Kepler Communications, with plans to deploy optical communications between nodes by 2027.

Alkalai described Sophia Space’s approach of designing specifically for the space environment. “Space seems to be a natural habitat for data centers, infinite source of power if you can harness it, and infinite source of cooling if you can radiate into it,” he said. “So our strategy from the beginning was to design these data centers, the technology, that would be strictly applicable to space, not taking Earth technology and putting it in space, but designing for space.”

Gordon outlined the ODC community’s research focus at present: “We need to better understand some of the avenues that we can push forward for those [use cases]. In doing so, we need to think about some of the technical feasibility studies that need to be done as well for each of those use cases, perhaps, and then also sort of the economic market modeling,” she said, noting that Aerospace is conducting physics and technical reviews to establish a common baseline for ODC technology.