Space Power

Today, Earth installs the equivalent of all orbital solar power roughly every hour and a half. 

The combined solar capacity of every spacecraft, satellite, and space station in orbit today – roughly 100 MW across 10,000+ Starlink birds and everything else – is smaller than a single mid-size solar farm in West Texas. SpaceX alone accounts for the vast majority – around 90%, we’d say – of the orbital total. 

With the Overton Window having dramatically expanded in the last 6 months, and space-based datacenters having been normalized among the powers that be in Silicon Valley, the space industry, and everywhere in between, we think that online discussion of the challenges (thermal, Kessler, etc.) is fairly well-saturated today – including in Per Aspera’s own pages, with our second-most popular Antimemo ever published (Realities of Space-Based Compute from May 2025).

Article by Jeff Crusey & Ryan Duffy. Read the full piece here.