Space computing power, “connection” is the key

Space computing power, “connection” is the key

Recently, the Zhongke Aerospace Lijian-1 carrier rocket soared into the sky in the Dongfeng Commercial Aerospace Innovation Test Zone. Among the nine satellites that were successfully put into orbit, satellites such as "Super Intelligent Computing No. 1" and "Pengcheng Nanke No. 1" have on-board AI intelligent computing capabilities. Since "space computing power" became popular, computing power satellites or satellites with intelligent computing capabilities are becoming the new favorites in the aerospace field, and "computing power in the sky" and "on-orbit AI" have also become eye-catching concepts.

Putting aside the intuitive and lively launch scene, front-line users such as emergency, meteorology, and scientific research are most concerned about these few things: Is the computing power in the sky worth the freight? Can the satellite "negotiate" some data processing work on its own? How long does it take for the data to be in our hands?

"Heaven senses and the earth calculates" to "Heaven senses and heaven calculates"

"Fast" is the core

Many satellites work like couriers, collecting data in the sky, passing the "packages" when they fly over the ground station, and then analyzing them at the "transfer station" - the ground data center before distributing them to users.

Limited by ground station resources, bandwidth and other factors, less than 1/10 of the effective satellite data can be transmitted back to the ground, and the data timeliness is poor. As a result, not only is "logistics slow", but as the number of satellites increases, the volume of "packages" increases sharply, and the scheduling and operation pressure on the "transfer station" is also increasing, making it inevitable that a large amount of satellite data will be wasted.

"We want to build a space computing constellation, send computing power to space, realize interconnection between computing satellites, and then send artificial intelligence to the sky." Wang Jian, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and director of the Zhijiang Laboratory, said, which represents a way of solving problems: moving computing power to the sky, so that "things in the sky can be done in the sky."

In 2025, the first 12 satellites of the Trisolaran Computing Constellation, the world's first fully orbitally interconnected space computing constellation, were successfully launched. In November of the same year, the constellation discovered a fire somewhere in northwest my country through the spaceborne "Surface Anomaly Detection Model" and automatically and effectively identified the fire smoke range. "Data is processed in space, and the processing results are sent directly to users. The efficiency can be improved to the minute level or even the second level." said Li Chao, chief technical engineer of the Trisolaran Computing Constellation.

In July this year, the Xiguang-203 satellite equipped with three AI weather models was included in the three-body calculation constellation. The satellite can directly produce forecast results in the sky, compressing the observation and warning process from the 90 minutes of traditional meteorological satellites to minute-level response, making typhoon path prediction, urban flooding warning, power grid disaster prevention and dispatching, etc. faster and more accurate.

"Fast" is not only a jump in the efficiency of information acquisition, but also a transformation of satellites from passive recorders to active judgers. From "Heaven's sense and earth's calculation" to "Heaven's sense and heaven's calculation", what space computing power really shortens is not only the distance of data transmission, but also the distance from "seeing" to "knowing".

"Working alone" to "working as a team"

Computing Star Network

The capacity and computing power of a single satellite are limited. If it cannot be interconnected with other satellites and connected to business processes, no matter how high the computing power is, it is just an expensive decoration.

"From the perspective of technological evolution and industrial scale, the development of space computing power can be divided into three stages." Guo Liang, chief engineer of the Cloud Computing and Big Data Institute of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, summarized the development path of space computing power into three stages - single-star computing, constellation networking, and computing power star network.

Currently, my country's space computing power industry is moving from theoretical exploration to on-orbit verification and preliminary networking, that is, relying on inter-satellite links to connect multiple satellites into a space local area network. When the computing power of a single satellite is insufficient, the idle computing power of neighboring satellites can be called to achieve distributed processing of tasks and dynamic scheduling of inter-satellite resources.

Take the three-body computing constellation as an example. The constellation has currently implemented 6-star chain building and 3-star distributed services. The constellation’s on-orbit computing power reaches 5POPS (5 quadrillion calculations per second), and the single-star computing power reaches a maximum of 744TOPS (744 trillion calculations per second). 20 A’s have been successfully deployed. The I model includes the 8 billion-parameter space-based remote sensing model and the 8-billion-parameter space-based astronomical time domain model with the largest on-orbit parameters in the world. It can complete model deployment and on-orbit update within 2 days, supporting application scenarios such as deep space exploration, collaborative water resources mapping, atmospheric monitoring, and autonomous wildfire monitoring.

According to Li Deren, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, it is not only necessary to interconnect satellites, but also to "connect" the four heterogeneous satellites of communication, navigation, remote sensing, and computing power into one.

The intelligent remote sensing satellite system led by Li Deren's team, the Oriental Eye Constellation, plans to "connect" 150 high-resolution optical satellites, 100 radar satellites, 4 hyperspectral satellites and 4 thermal infrared satellites into a network through laser communications to build a "navigation, navigation and remote computing" integrated real-time intelligent service system for aerospace information. "At that time, everyone can send requests on their mobile phones, and the satellite will process the required information and deliver it accurately within a few minutes. Everyone can play with the satellite like WeChat," Li Deren said.

E-commerce, instant social networking, artificial intelligence... Just as these things and forms fostered by the Internet have shaped a vibrant information society, the space Internet will also give birth to countless unimaginable applications and service scenarios - and the key to the future is to "connect" satellites first.

“Fashion items” to “infrastructure”

Many challenges

Although the prospects are promising, there are still several hurdles to overcome before a true space Internet can be built.

The first hurdle is reliability. There is no air convection in space, and heat can only be dissipated by radiation. How to dissipate heat from the high-power chips of computing satellites is a prerequisite for satellites to go to space, not an ancillary project. At the same time, radiation-resistant reinforcement technology, inter-satellite high-speed laser communications, and ultra-large-scale constellation attitude and orbit coordinated control still need to be continuously researched.

The second hurdle is cost. "High freight is the most realistic problem." Li Chao's concerns are also the consensus of the industry. The value of the space Internet can only be truly reflected when the constellation reaches a certain scale. Currently, my country's satellite networking progress is relatively lagging behind, and the cultivation of commercial ecology needs to be strengthened. In addition, my country's reusable rockets are moving from technical verification to engineering verification. The number of satellites carried by a single rocket launch is limited, and cost control needs to be further optimized.

The third hurdle is the leap from “can be connected to the Internet” to “can be dispatched”. The interface standards, computing power and storage allocation of heterogeneous satellites, task migration when a single satellite is abnormal, model version management and safe rollback all require long-term verification.

There are many challenges, and the solution is gradually becoming clear. In 2025, the "National Space Administration Action Plan for Promoting High-quality and Safe Development of Commercial Spaceflight (2025-2027)" was issued. One of the important goals is to promote private enterprises to participate in aerospace scientific research plans and basic scientific research topics, and to inject strong impetus into the construction of the space Internet. With scientific and technological innovation as the fulcrum, new R&D institutions, commercial aerospace, application companies and other diverse entities can be connected into a chain to improve and accelerate the construction of the space Internet. For example, the Trisolaran Computing Constellation was jointly built by multiple scientific research institutions and companies, and it only took 9 months from project establishment to launch. More importantly, my country's huge application scenarios and domestic demand market provide a rich "test field" for the space Internet.

How far is the space Internet from us? The answer may lie in every ordinary launch. When computing power satellites lose the label of "fashion item" and penetrate into everyone's life like water and electricity, that is the moment when the space Internet truly arrives.

(Our reporter Zhang Xiaohua)