The study has been split in 4 mains work packages.
First work package was dedicated to the review of European data centers needs and context, as for the requested computing and storage capacity and the associated energy consumption. With projection up to 2050.
These activities has been performed and several deliverables have been provided, showing that Data Center could represent up to 10% of the EU electricity consumption, CO2 emmission and water consumption by 2050.
Second work package has allowed to perform technical trade-offs for defining the best envisaged solution to deploy data centers in space. A Minimum Viable Product of 10MW has been defined and an objective of 1GW deployed in 2050 has been set.
Preliminary architecture has been defined and presented in the associated work package deliverable.
Third work package was focused on the consolidation of the system architecture and the refinement of technical details. With the definition of the new European Super Heavy Lift Vehicle requested to deploy the large space infrastructure, but also the innovative and ingenious space infrastructure architecture allowing a mass reduction and an optimised system repartition. In-orbit deployment and assembly has been refined and a robotic concept has been defined. Communication means within space data centers and between space assets and ground has been reviewed and a communication architecture has been defined.
Last work package has concluded the study with the analysis of environmental figures and comparison between terrestrial data center and space data center based on the defined architecture, and on the business plan definition in order to check space data centers concept viability.
These analysis have shown that space data centers can be considered as a promising alternative to terrestrial assets.
Development plan and growth potential analysis has been performed to identify the technology gaps and the envisaged evolution for space data centers.
All performed analysis as shown encouraging results that need to be consolidated in further studies.
