Plus: The bottleneck facing space-based data centers
| By Dan Robitzski
Welcome back to our weekly newsletter highlighting the opinions and perspectives of the SpaceNews community.
| | | | | | A call for reliable space rescue for the day we'll eventually need it
In the past year, issues with Starliner prompted some astronauts to have an unexpected extended stay on the International Space Station, medical issues prompted the early return of a later ISS crew and a space debris impact prompted rescue operations at China's Tiangong space station. These are important signs that the space industry needs to start thinking ahead to prepare for short-turnaround rescue capabilities, argued Optica Labs COO Nick Reese in a recent SpaceNews commentary.
In his article, Reese drew on military comparisons such as the "ready 5" aircraft, an aircraft on Navy ships that's kept in a state of readiness to be launched within five minutes of a call going out.
"One of the first considerations around space rescue is how quickly one would need to be launched. In the case of SpaceX Crew 11, the medical issue was identified eight days before the crew's return. In this specific situation, this timeline worked because of the level of emergency, but that may not be the case during a more urgent emergency in the future," Reese wrote.
"To be effective and reliable, a future space rescue capability would need to be on standby, ready to launch in a given window of time much the way Naval aircraft are positioned. It would not be in a matter of minutes like the ready 5, but there would need to be a rocket, specific supplies, a crew and fuel that could be quickly consolidated for a rescue mission."
You can see the rest of the article here. | | | | |
Space-based infrastructure is increasingly presented as the solution to the staggering energy and water costs of running data centers on Earth. And while this represents a significant engineering challenge, the real bottleneck for space-based data centers is logistics, and especially building out a space-rated supply chain, according to an opinion article by John David Callison, an advisor at Abelian Security Council, and Joseph Minafra, the lead of Innovation and Technical Partnerships for the NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute at NASA Ames Research Center.
Terrestrial data centers work because they have an assumed standardization and interoperability that space systems haven't yet fleshed out, the authors argue. "This lack of interoperability will likely make orbital and lunar data centers several times more expensive than those on Earth," they wrote.
To stave off the issue, industry players and regulators need to collaborate on a unified bill of materials for data centers with required interoperability, space-rated qualification standards, and a procurement framework that's aligned with realistic launch cadences.
You can see the full article, which was also featured in the March 2026 issue of SpaceNews magazine, here. | | | | | |  | | Illustration of an optically interconnected orbital data center node Axiom Space and Spacebilt plan to install on the International Space Station in 2027. Credit: Axiom Space
| | | | SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community's diverse perspectives. Whether you're an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion (at) spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. If you have something to submit, read some of our recent opinion articles and our submission guidelines to get a sense of what we're looking for. The perspectives shared in these opinion articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent their employers or professional affiliations. | | | | | | |
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