This is a bottom-up revenue model for orbital compute infrastructure, calibrated against CoreWeave's published contract economics. Two independent approaches converge on a revenue range of $10.7 billion to $16.0 billion per gigawatt of input power per year. The lower bound captures the advantage of higher Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). The upper bound prices in custom inference silicon performance of operations per delivered watt. Silicon efficiency is the dominant variable, producing a $14.5 billion/GW swing across its feasible range. Revenue per GW is location-independent; orbital deployment wins on the cost side, where Wright's Law learning curves compress launch and subsystem costs with each replacement cycle while revenue holds.

We model Starship's cost per kilogram under two recovery modes and map the results against the launch cost thresholds from our orbital compute crossover analysis. The finding: booster reuse, already demonstrated, gets Starship more than halfway to the base case. Ship reuse, which SpaceX is sequencing toward with V3, crosses that threshold on the first reflight.

A bottom-up cost analysis comparing orbital and terrestrial AI datacenter economics. Using a parametric economic model, we test three chip architectures and three launch cost scenarios against Bernstein Research, Stargate, and Nvidia terrestrial compute cost benchmarks.We estimate a 1 GW orbital compute constellation costs $46B/GW at 2028 deployment, already below Stargate's $50B benchmark, and falls below Bernstein's optimistic $35B/GW floor by 2032 as Wright's Law compresses satellite manufacturing costs. SpaceX's vertical integration, Terafab's chip economics, and accelerating terrestrial cost inflation are converging to make orbital compute economically defensible sooner than the market appreciates.

This analysis maps the rapidly emerging orbital compute supply chain, showing how thermodynamics is now the dominant constraint driving new suppliers, capital flows, and talent demand. While consolidation and vertical integration (in particular SpaceX) will squeeze many early-stage component players, major breakthroughs in solar arrays and radiator technologies remain essential to reach viable 100 kW/ton power densities, creating a narrow set of high-risk, high-upside frontier investment opportunities.

This analysis explores the mass budgets for orbital data centers, revealing how ditching traditional satcom's heavy RF payloads frees up resources for massive power and cooling systems, unlocking Elon's vision for high-density space compute. It uncovers the triangular bottleneck of solar, thermal, and compute subsystems as the key to scaling.