Dual-Service-Plane Orbital Cloud Computing: The World's First Proposed Unified Framework for Integrating Four Major Internet Platforms with an Open, Earth-Accessible Space-Based Cloud Computing Infrastructure
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: The development of modern Internet infrastructure has historically depended on terrestrial data centers and cloud computing platforms to support social networking, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, electronic commerce, and application hosting. Meanwhile, advances in satellite networking, orbital edge computing, distributed space computing, and space-based data centers are creating new possibilities for extending computational infrastructure beyond Earth. However, the potential role of orbital computing extends beyond supporting space-based applications or processing satellite-generated data. An orbital computing infrastructure could also operate as an externally accessible cloud service provider, allowing individuals, enterprises, software developers, research institutions, and other organizations on Earth to directly access computational resources hosted in space. This paper proposes Dual-Service-Plane Orbital Cloud Computing (DSPOCC), a unified conceptual framework that integrates four complete general-purpose Internet service platforms with an open orbital cloud computing infrastructure that serves both orbital systems and terrestrial customers. The proposed framework consists of five principal operational systems: (1) a complete orbital social media platform, (2) a general-purpose orbital Internet search engine, (3) an orbital large language model (LLM) service, (4) a complete orbital e-commerce platform, and (5) an open orbital cloud computing platform. The first four systems provide major Internet services, including social networking, web information retrieval, intelligent language processing, and online commercial transactions. The fifth system provides shared computing, storage, networking, virtualization, application deployment, workload scheduling, resource allocation, and infrastructure management. Unlike architectures in which orbital computing resources are reserved exclusively for satellite operations or internal space-based applications, the proposed cloud platform has two distinct service objectives. Its internal service plane supplies computational resources to the four orbital Internet platforms, enabling them to execute workloads and coordinate their operations. Its external service plane provides on-demand computing services to customers on Earth, including individuals, enterprises, developers, universities, research institutions, and other organizations. The central contribution is the combination of these two service planes within one orbital cloud infrastructure. Terrestrial customers can request CPU and GPU resources, memory, storage, application hosting, model inference, data processing, and other computational services through network-accessible interfaces. They may deploy applications, execute workloads, access managed services, and retrieve computational results without necessarily owning or operating orbital hardware. The orbital cloud platform can allocate resources dynamically according to workload characteristics, available capacity, energy constraints, network conditions, security requirements, and service priorities. Tasks may be executed entirely in orbit, partially on Earth, or through coordinated ground–orbit execution. The four orbital Internet platforms can simultaneously consume the same infrastructure through controlled internal resource interfaces. This paper introduces a dual-service-plane architecture, defines the responsibilities of its five operational systems, and establishes the relationships between internal orbital workloads and externally submitted terrestrial workloads. It further examines resource pooling, multi-tenant isolation, orbital workload scheduling, service-level agreements, application programming interfaces, cloud service provisioning, usage metering, billing, distributed storage, inter-satellite networking, and hybrid task execution. The framework also identifies major technical and operational challenges, including computational capacity, power generation, thermal management, communication latency, bandwidth limitations, intermittent connectivity, data consistency, workload migration, cybersecurity, privacy, service availability, economic sustainability, and regulatory compliance. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to explicitly formulate a unified framework in which an orbital cloud computing platform simultaneously serves as the shared computational infrastructure for multiple complete general-purpose Internet platforms and as an open, externally accessible cloud service provider for terrestrial customers. This priority claim concerns the particular combination of internal orbital infrastructure services and external Earth-accessible commercial cloud services within the proposed architecture; it does not claim that orbital computing, space-based data centers, cloud computing, satellite edge computing, or commercial cloud services individually originate from this study. The proposed framework establishes a conceptual foundation for investigating orbital computing infrastructure as both an operational environment for major Internet services and a potential provider of computing resources to the wider terrestrial digital economy.
Author: Zhang, Jincheng
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225792699
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: