ASCEND: Thales Alenia Space
to lead European feasibility study for data centers
in space
November 14, 2022
Thales Alenia Space, the joint
company between Thales (67%) and Leonardo (33%), has
been chosen by the European Commission to lead the
ASCEND (Advanced Space Cloud for European Net zero
emission and Data sovereignty)
feasibility study for data centers in orbit, as part
of Europe’s vast Horizon Europe research program.
Digital technology’s expanding
environmental footprint is becoming a major
challenge: the burgeoning need for digitalization
means that data centers in Europe and around the
world are growing at an exponential pace, which in
turn has a critical energy and environmental impact.
A consortium led by Thales
Alenia Space has been set up to find an ambitious
solution for Europe, namely to install data center
stations in orbit, powered by solar power plants
generating several hundred megawatts. This project
could help meet Europe’s Green Deal
goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 and
would also be an unprecedented development in the
European space and digital ecosystem.
This concept makes direct use
of the energy produced in space outside of the earth
atmosphere: the only link with the ground would be
high-throughput Internet connections
based on optical communications, a technique for
which Europe has mastered the underlying
technologies.
For the ASCEND feasibility
study, Thales Alenia Space is leading a consortium
of companies with complementary areas of expertise
spanning the environment (Carbone 4, VITO), cloud
computing (Orange, CloudFerro, Hewlett Packard
Enterprise Belgium), launch vehicles (ArianeGroup)
and orbital systems (German aerospace center DLR,
Airbus Defence and Space and Thales Alenia Space).
The first objective of this
study will be to assess if the carbon emissions from
the production and launch of these space
infrastructures will be significantly lower than the
emissions generated by ground-based data centers,
therefore contributing to the achievement of global
carbon neutrality. The second objective will be to
prove that it is possible to develop the required
launch solution and to ensure the deployment and
operability of these spaceborne data centers using
robotic assistance technologies currently being
developed in Europe, such as the EROSS IOD
demonstrator.
This project is expected to
demonstrate to which extent space-based data centers
would limit the energy and environmental impact of
their ground counterparts, thus allowing major
investments within the scope of Europe’s Green Deal,
possibly justifying the development of a more
climate-friendly, reusable heavy launch vehicle.
Europe could thus regain its leadership in space
transport and space logistics, as well as the
assembly and operations of large infrastructures in
orbit.
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