Axiom and Spacebilt to establish ISS data center node

PARIS, France – Axiom Space and Spacebilt announced plans Sept. 16 to deliver a data center node with optical communications links to the International Space Station in 2027.

The Axiom Orbital Data Center Node on ISS, called AxODC Node ISS, being developed in collaboration with Spacebilt, will feature an optical communications terminal from Skyloom plus hardware from Phison Electronics and Microchip Technology.

The project is aimed at establishing a “high-performance optical data center node” on ISS, enabling spacecraft, astronauts and researchers to store and process data, according to the news release.

“AxODC Node ISS is particularly exciting because not only are we increasing computing capacity on the space station, but we are integrating commercial optical communications terminals with the station, which gives our computing hardware connectivity to satellites in the mesh network,” Jason Aspiotis, Axiom global director of in-space data and security, said in a statement. “This is part of our roadmap for a distributed and federated network” of orbital data center nodes.

Axiom began testing data storage and processing on ISS with the 2022 delivery of an Amazon Web Services Snowcone solid-state drive. In August, Houston-based Axiom and Red Hat, a North Carolina-based open-source software specialist, sent AxDCU-1, another data center, to the space station.

When Axiom’s three orbital data centers are connected, they will provide enough data-storage capacity and processing power for cloud-computing applications including artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, according to the news release.

Spacebilt’s Role

Florida startup Spacebilt is leading the campaign to design AxODC Node ISS and to link it with payloads inside and outside the space station. Spacebilt’s petabyte-scale Large In-Space Server includes Phison Pascari solid-state drives and Microchip’s PIC64 High-Performance Spaceflight Computing.

If all goes as planned, the 2027 launch will be the first spaceflight for PIC64, which Microchip developed with NASA funding. Phison’s Pascari, part of Lonestar’s lunar data center, traveled to the moon in February on an Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander.

The collaboration “brings a new era in compute and storage in space,” Dennis Wingo, Spacebilt president and chief technology officer, said in a statement.

Optical Links

For the project, Skyloom is providing an optical terminal compatible with the Space Development Agency Tranche 1 Transport Layer.

“We are laying the foundation for an optical backbone that will one day make space as connected and data-rich as Earth,” Eric Moltzau, Skyloom chief commercial officer, said in a statement. “By enabling high-speed optical links to the AxODC Node, we’re accelerating the future of orbital cloud computing and AI-driven decision-making in space.”