Thinking on space infrastructure.
The FCC's Part 100 Order: The Reform's Biggest Test Case Is Exempt From the Reform
The FCC's new Part 100 rules replace decades-old satellite licensing with a faster, presumption-based process, but the megaconstellation filings that most justify the reform, including SpaceX's million-satellite orbital data center application, are excluded from its faster timelines. For the 522 GEO positions Clarke tracks, the order also creates the first mandatory cross-operator tracking-data regime, on legal authority Congress is actively contesting.
Orbital Data Centers: The Engineering Case
Terrestrial data centers face hard physical limits: power constraints, cooling water depletion, grid instability. Orbital data centers offer continuous solar at 95%+ capacity factor and radiative cooling with a PUE near 1.01. This report examines the technical, economic, and strategic case for when the math works.
Designing for Mars
A Mars habitat must hold 101 kPa against roughly 0.6 kPa outside, limit radiation toward a 50 mSv/yr threshold in an environment averaging about 244 mSv/yr at the surface, survive daily temperature swings on the order of 70°C, and keep a small group psychologically functional for years with no exit. This is not harsh-climate architecture. The constraints are different in kind.
The Stack: Every Layer Needed to Become Multiplanetary
Earth is one planet orbiting one star. Every extinction risk has a single point of failure. A species on two planets has a backup. Getting there is fourteen problems stacked in sequence, each requiring the previous to be substantially solved. This is the chain, from launch to governance.
What the Intelsat Bankruptcy Revealed About Orbital Real Estate
On May 13, 2020, Intelsat filed for Chapter 11 with $14.8 billion in debt. Through two years of restructuring, its orbital slot portfolio emerged intact. SES acquired it for $3.1 billion in 2025. The sequence reveals something fundamental about what makes these positions valuable, and what Clarke is built to price.