Processing Earth observation imagery in orbit instead of downlinking it

Everybody else is putting Jetson or other ruggedized chips — much more reliable, but about a hundred times less performant.

I also understand the latency changes your use cases. Can you tell us your priority use cases? Because SpaceX has many initiatives around reducing latency. That defines your prospects as well.

Like a gaming company would probably not be first to go.

Yeah, true. For the first three or four years, we're not really competing for terrestrial workloads. The latency discussion — sub-20ms through Starlink, which enables gaming — honestly isn't really related to our first few satellite iterations.

We're mainly talking with Earth Observation satellites who produce enormous amounts of data on orbit. What they currently do — Black Sky, Planet Labs, etc. — is take images and wait up to half an hour for a ground station, then downlink about 1% of total imagery.

That's our main first customer set. We'll connect using high-bandwidth space-to-space optical terminals — much higher bandwidth than space-to-ground RF, and no waiting for a ground station.