Space is no longer just a destination — it is an active operating environment. Tracking the compute, connectivity, and robotics of off-world missions.
The FCC Drops Environmental Review for Satellite Licences as Google's First TPU Satellite Reaches Orbit
On September 30 the Federal Communications Commission voted that its licensing of satellites, including their launch, deployment and operation, is not a major federal action under the National Environmental Policy Act, so those licences no longer trigger environmental review at the Commission.
Texas Halts Data-Center Permits as Google Schedules Its First TPU Satellite
On September 21, Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s environmental regulator to stop issuing permits to data centers until the grid operator and the state water board finish auditing them.
Compute Demonstrators Reach Orbit as Texas Audits Data-Center Projects
Two Chinese orbital-compute demonstrators, Chaozhisuan-1 and PEGA-SUS1, reached orbit on September 20 aboard a Kinetica-1 rocket, and no performance data has been reported from either, including the 100 gigabit per second laser link PEGA-SUS1 is meant to test.
A Five-Year Target and a Request for Information
China’s industry ministry published a compute target on September 7: 9,800 exaflops of intelligent computing capacity by 2030, against 1,590 exaflops in 2025, backed by 3.8 trillion yuan of information-infrastructure investment.
Two Answers to the Same Electricity Problem
On August 31 the United States published a declaration of national emergency over its bulk-power system. The order names its own cause: “the rapid growth of advanced manufacturing, data centers, artificial intelligence, and defense production has increased the Nation’s dependence on abundant…
A Spaceport for Ten Thousand Launches, and a Typhoon That Cost a Year
SpaceX announced a $100 billion spaceport in coastal Louisiana on August 25, designed for more than 1,000 missions a year at opening and an eventual target of over 10,000 launches annually.
Swift's Rescue Fails, and the Maintenance Case for Orbital Data Centers Gets Harder
A commercial spacecraft sent to save a NASA observatory will not save it. On August 19, NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies abandoned the plan for the LINK spacecraft to capture and boost the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and NASA now expects Swift to re-enter the atmosphere later this year.
SpaceX's First Balance Sheet Puts the AI Money in Memphis
The company asking federal regulators for permission to launch a million orbital data-center satellites filed its first quarterly report as a public company. It disclosed $15.83 billion of AI infrastructure spending in three months, and AI revenue earned renting terrestrial GPUs in Tennessee.
Two Agencies Clear the Regulatory Path as a Servicing Spacecraft Loses Control
Two federal agencies moved in the same ten days to reduce the environmental and procedural friction around getting hardware into orbit, while the one spacecraft flying a mission that orbital compute actually depends on lost control of its own attitude.
China Ships Space-Compute Satellites as the Economic Case Draws Its First Hard Audit
Between July 15 and July 23, 2026, the orbital-compute story split cleanly along a fault line that has been forming for months. On one side, deployment accelerated: China used the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai to launch the first satellites of a planned 1,000-spacecraft…