Cyclops Space
The always-on optical link for orbital
data centres.
Cyclops holds laser relays above the cloud line through a tether — 99.99% uptime, in any weather.
00 / THE RELAY
Above the cloud line, always clear.
Cyclops holds the receive aperture at 20 km — into the stratosphere, above every cloud. The downlink from orbit lands in permanently clear air, and the tether carries the data to the ground over fibre.
Endeavour through the cloud deck · STS-134 · NASA
01 / RADIO
Radio can’t carry it.
Radio runs on licensed spectrum — narrow, congested bands shared across every operator in orbit. Even the widest allocation tops out near a few Gbps, two orders of magnitude short of what an orbital data centre running inference demands.
Sunset at Goldstone · NASA/JPL
02 / WEATHER
Lasers die in cloud.
Optical clears the bandwidth ceiling, then inherits the atmosphere. One cloud layer scatters the beam and takes the link to zero — no power margin buys it back. On the ground, availability is just the local clear-sky fraction.
A storm front along the Persian Gulf · NASA
03 / SITE DIVERSITY
More ground stations don’t fix it.
Cloud cover is spatially correlated over hundreds of kilometres, so diversity sites must sit far apart. A front over one station reroutes traffic ~1,900 km across terrestrial backhaul, adding 50+ ms — latency inference workloads can’t absorb.
Farmland meeting the coast, from the ISS · NASA
