Technical Specifications and Requirements
What performance can an orbital datacenter promise, and what does reliability cost?
Chapter summary
Radiation, intermittent ground contact and the impossibility of repair shape every specification. The chapter sets availability tiers, latency by altitude, and the overheads that error correction and duty cycles impose on usable capacity.
Key takeaways
- 1
Error detection and correction for single-event upsets cuts effective compute throughput by 10–30% versus terrestrial systems.
- 2
Five-nines availability (5.26 minutes of downtime a year) costs 2–3x a four-nines system.
- 3
At 550 km, round-trip latency is about 5–7 ms, competitive with transcontinental fibre at 50–100 ms.
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