As entrepreneurs plan orbital data center constellations with up to a million satellites in low Earth orbit, government and industry experts warn that the space industry needs urgent coordination and new rules of the road to manage skyrocketing collision risks.
The push to move digital infrastructure off the ground is accelerating. Driven by rising terrestrial energy costs, strained power grids, and mounting local permitting hurdles, entrepreneurs have floated plans to process and store data aboard low-Earth-orbit satellites powered by large solar arrays. Major aerospace players and startups alike are moving from concept to execution. Last year, Starcloud launched an Nvidia processing unit into orbit, while Axiom Space deployed two data-center nodes in January to lay the groundwork for space-based cloud computing. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are designing massive constellations of data-processing units.
Yet deploying hundreds of thousands, or even a million, satellites creates a logistical challenge. During a panel discussion organized by the Secure World Foundation, industry and government officials emphasized that satellite operators cannot rely on ad-hoc maneuvering as orbital density multiplies.
Scaling Orbital Traffic and the Million-Satellite Collision Risk
While SpaceX’s Starlink constellation has established an operational precedent, its current scale highlights the magnitude of the incoming traffic surge. Ezra Feilden, co-founder and chief technology officer of Starcloud—a startup that has filed plans for an 88,000-satellite constellation—pointed to Starlink as a baseline.
Feilden called Starlink a good example for the industry to follow regarding conjunction avoidance, beginning-of-life, end-of-life
satellite operations. However, Starlink operates approximately 10,000 satellites—just 1% of the scale envisioned by upcoming orbital data center proposals. That expansion threatens to overwhelm existing tracking and avoidance systems.
Ron Birk, principal director of The Aerospace Corp.’s Space Enterprise Evolution Directorate, detailed the math facing future operators.
Birk warned that in an environment with up to a million spacecraft, that could be more like half a billion maneuvers.
While basic orbital mechanics suggest conjunctions scale by the square of the satellite count in intersecting planes, orbital data center designs could bypass some of that risk by utilizing dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits that do not intersect, allowing higher density.
Establishing Global Standards and the Energy Advantage
That density brings its own operational caveats. Feilden noted that dawn-dusk constellations require all participating satellites to orbit in the exact same direction. If operators mix directions, collision probabilities spike.
He acknowledged that avoiding this scenario requires a significant amount of coordination, admitting that the industry currently lacks concrete suggestions for how to achieve it.
To build global standards, experts point to emerging regulatory and traffic coordination frameworks. Jeff O’Neil, director of government affairs at Planet, compared ongoing Commerce Department efforts to establish the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, to the historical development of global air traffic control. Meanwhile, Matias Cava, national space policy lead at the Commerce Department’s Office of Space Commerce, highlighted the agency’s newly announced Space Commerce Certification mission authorization system, designed to ensure compliance with the Outer Space Treaty.
Despite these regulatory steps, the certification remains voluntary. Cava encouraged operators not to wait for government mandates, urging them to establish best practices proactively. The push for orbital infrastructure is driven heavily by terrestrial energy constraints. Terrestrial data centers are projected to fuel nearly half of US electricity demand growth by 2030, straining local grids. In contrast, space-based solar arrays avoid weather interference and atmospheric attenuation, allowing a space-based array to generate up to five times more energy than its terrestrial equivalent, according to one industry analysis.
Regulatory Timelines and Operator Responsibility
As regulatory bodies build out voluntary authorization frameworks and traffic management systems, the immediate burden falls squarely on commercial operators. Because government compliance frameworks remain in their early stages, startups and established aerospace firms alike face a window to harmonize their orbital paths.
Without mandatory global routing rules or established direction protocols for dawn-dusk orbital shells, individual corporate decisions will dictate whether low Earth orbit remains navigable or becomes a traffic hazard. As industry leaders evaluate multi-thousand-satellite deployments, the core dilemma remains unresolved: deciding which side of the orbital highway to drive on before the traffic arrives.
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