When Will Baiju Bhatt Launch an Orbital Data Center?

Baiju Bhatt says the goal is to launch the first in-house built system at the end of 2028. He does not think the opening will last forever, so the work has to land while the demand is there. He calls the date ambitious and says the team is working hard to hit it. An in-house system by the end of 2028 is still inside the time it takes to build a big data center on Earth, and shorter than a lot of the timelines he sees.

The rocket program exists to serve that data center in space, not to do human spaceflight and not to carry other people's payload. He says they may do more later, and that is not the plan now. They need a rocket program that works. They do not need the world's greatest one. On the range of rocket engines, he would rather build a Honda Civic than a Bugatti Veyron. A lot of his recent effort has gone into standing up the rocket engineering team in Seattle.