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Lumen Orbit recently launched!
"Lumen Orbit is building data centers in space to make use of 24/7 solar energy and passive cooling."
TL;DR - Train future large AI models in space to make use of abundant solar energy, cooling, and the ability to freely scale up.
Founded by Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden & Adi Oltean
Philip, CEO, is a second-time founder who has worked at McKinsey & Co. working on satellite projects for national space agencies. Philip has an MPA in National Security & Technology from Harvard University, an MBA from Wharton, an MA in Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics from Columbia University, and is a CFA Charter holder.
Ezra, CTO, has a decade of experience with satellite design, specializing in deployable solar arrays and large deployable structures. Ezra comes from Airbus Defense & Space (SSTL) and Oxford Space Systems, where he worked on missions including NASA's Lunar Pathfinder. Ezra has a PhD in Materials Engineering from Imperial College London.
Adi, Chief Engineer, was previously a Principal Software Engineer at SpaceX, where he was part of the Starlink network team enabling Starlink for in-motion users, including Starship. Before that, he deployed the first LLMs on large GPU production clusters at Microsoft, where he also delivered more than 25 patents in more than two decades. Adi holds degrees in Computer Science and Chemistry from the top two universities in Bucharest.
The team is building data centers in space. They’re launching the first satellite next year, which will have the most powerful GPUs ever put in space by >100x. They will launch a larger iteration each year until they reach gigawatt scale.
❌The Problem
Future hyperscale data centers will put a huge strain on electricity grids, freshwater distribution, and the Western world’s permitting systems. It will simply not be possible to deploy multi-gigawatt scale data centers rapidly in the way they build data centers today.
✨The Solution
Lumen Orbit takes advantage of falling launch costs to make use of inexpensive solar energy in space and low-cost passive radiative cooling, rapidly scaling up orbital data centers almost indefinitely without the physical or permitting constraints faced on Earth. This will ensure they can continue training ever larger models without destroying the environment.
⚙️ Read their white paper
Check out their white paper for more information on why space data centers are the future and how they’re going about making this happen.
See a short video on the design here.
🏆 What they’ve achieved so far
- Booked their first launch (May 2025) and their second launch (H2 2026)
- Set up their payload manufacturing facility in Redmond, WA
- Designed and started building and testing their first spacecraft, with the fastest GPUs to ever launch to space by ~100x
- Created concept designs for their micro data center (2026 launch) and their Hypercluster data center (launching when Starship-class launch vehicles enter commercial service)
- Secured high-value LOIs for H100 compute time in space
🔜 What’s next
- Launch and complete their demonstrator mission, which will train the first LLM in space!
- Prototype their micro-data center design
- Secure contracts which incumbent hyper scalers
Learn More
🌐 Visit www.lumenorbit.com to learn more.
🤝 Join the team! If you are or know any hardcore engineers with experience in aerospace or data center infrastructure and are interested in working with the Lumen team, please get in touch!
