Blue Origin, the space conglomerate founded by Amazon chair Jeff Bezos, has asked the U.S. government for permission to launch a network of more than 50,000 satellites that will act as a data center in orbit. In a March 19 document filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Blue Origin's attorneys described 'Project Sunrise' as a network of spacecraft that will perform advanced computation in orbit to 'ease mounting pressure on U.S. communities and natural resources by shifting energy ' and water-intensive compute away from terrestrial data centers.' Blue Origin's filing did not describe its plans for the satellites in detail, so it's hard to know how much computing power the company is aiming to generate in space. It does note that Blue Origin plans to use another satellite constellation it is seeking to build, called TeraWave, as a high-throughput communications backbone for the data satellites. Shifting massive compute to space is attractive because solar energy is...
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