Just a few minutes after the midday of May 14, a Long March 2D rocket took off from Jiuquan’s launch center with an ambitious objective: to put into orbit the first 12 satellites of the computing space constellation “Three-Body”. It is the official beginning of which China presents as the first supercomputing network distributed in space, a movement that marks a before and after in the race to move artificial intelligence beyond traditional data centers.
A scale jump: from data centers to space. The constellation, led by Zhejiang Lab and developed in collaboration with the company Guoxing Yuhang (Ada Space), is part of the so -called “Star Computing Plan”. This first mission, called 021, has placed in the same orbit 12 smart satellites with names that honor Chinese cities such as Neijiang, Haikou or Taizhou.
Each of them is equipped with an intelligent calculation system and laser connectivity up to 100 GB/s to form an interconnected orbital network. According to the official information published by the Chinese Government and collected by media such as Xinhua, these first satellites total a capacity of 5 POPs (peta-operations per second) and have in conjunction of 30 TB of storage on board.
What are pops? HKEXNEWS explains that 1 POPS is equivalent to a four -year period (10^15) of operations per second. China’s goal is to deploy a constellation that, according to the information that Spacenews manages, could reach 2,800 satellites, with a total capacity of 1,000 pops.
An orbit laboratory. Each satellite has a space computer developed by Zhejiang Lab, with a capacity of up to 744 tops (thera-operations per second) per unit. In addition, they are accompanied by a model of 8,000 million parameters, specially designed to operate directly into orbit. This allows real -time data processing tasks without the need to send all the information to land stations.
Use cases: from natural disasters to astronomical science. The satellites are designed to offer very specific services: Gamma ray detection, generation of 3D digital twins of entire regions, remote observation with processing on board and monitoring of natural phenomena. One of them even includes an X -ray polarimeter developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Guangxi, designed to detect gamma explosions and activate in second coordinated observations with other missions. In addition, according to Ada Space, the data collected will also serve for civil applications such as emergencies, immersive video games and smart tourism.
A orbital cloud under sovereign control. Behind the deployment there is a geostrategic ambition: build a spatial computing infrastructure under Chinese control that combines global coverage with energy efficiency and low latency. Unlike land data centers, satellites can use solar energy continuously and do not require active cooling systems.
What’s coming: more power, more satellites. Ada Space has already confirmed that he is working on a second generation of satellites with even more power. The objective is clear: validate the computing architecture distributed in orbit, climb it and turn it into the nucleus of a space cloud capable of operating large -scale AI models without depending on the terrestrial infrastructure.
Images | Ada Space
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