Space: The Next PPP Frontier

Stand in the desert of Wadi Rum on a clear night and watch the sky for a few minutes. Small points of light slide quietly across the stars. Most of them are satellites, and many of them belong to Starlink. Each one is a piece of infrastructure, as real as a road or a power line, built and run by a private company and used by millions of people on the ground. Space has become a place where infrastructure gets built, and the biggest projects of the next fifty years may be built there.

The sky is already full of infrastructure

Every phone that shows a blue dot on a map is talking to satellites. GPS was built by the United States government and is free for anyone on Earth to use. Weather forecasts, shipping routes, bank payments and power grids all depend on signals from space. About 16,800 working satellites circle the Earth, according to the KeepTrack catalog in October 2026, and most of them were launched in the last five years.

The biggest change is in communications. Starlink, the satellite internet network run by SpaceX, had about 11,150 satellites in orbit in October 2026 and 13.6 million customers at the end of September, in about 160 countries and territories. A small dish on a roof can now bring fast internet to a farm, a ship, a refugee camp or a village with no cable at all. Jordan’s Telecommunications Regulatory Commission signed a license with Starlink Jordan in 2023, and a local reseller, Sama X, received its own license in December 2025 to bring the service to remote areas in the north and south. Amazon is building a rival network called Amazon Leo, and more are coming.

In plain terms, a network of satellites is a ring of cell towers in the sky. It reaches places that cables never will, and it is quickly becoming part of the basic wiring of the planet.

Why data centers are heading to space

Artificial intelligence runs in data centers, and data centers need huge amounts of electricity. Colossus, the AI computer that xAI built near Memphis in the United States, reached about one gigawatt of computing capacity by mid-2026, roughly the output of a large power plant. Cities and power grids are struggling to keep up with demand like this, and every new data center on Earth needs land, power lines and water for cooling.

Space offers a simple answer to the power problem: the Sun. Google’s researchers write that “in the right orbit, a solar panel can be up to 8 times more productive than on earth.” In some orbits a satellite stays in sunlight almost all the time, so it never has a night, never sees a cloud and needs only small batteries. A data center up there would also need no land and no water.

Who is betting on it

In November 2025 Google announced Project Suncatcher, which it calls a research moonshot, to put its own AI chips on solar-powered satellites that talk to each other with lasers. Its next step is a mission with the satellite company Planet to launch two test satellites by early 2027. Writing in Semafor, Reed Albergotti said the idea comes straight from the minds of Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used the profits of search to chase much bigger projects. Page has looked to space before: in 2012 he and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt backed Planetary Resources, a company set up to mine asteroids. Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, has said that a decade or so from now, people will see space as a more normal way to build data centers.

Eric Schmidt went further. In 2025 he took control of the rocket company Relativity Space, and Ars Technica reported that his goal is to put data centers in orbit. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, told Italian Tech Week in October 2025, as Reuters reported, that gigawatt-scale data centers will be built in space within 10 to 20 years, and that steady sunshine will let them beat data centers on the ground.

Elon Musk is moving fastest. On January 30, 2026, SpaceX asked the US Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch up to one million satellites for what it calls the SpaceX Orbital Data Center system. Days later, on February 2, SpaceX bought xAI, the company behind Colossus, to bring rockets, satellites and AI under one roof. A smaller company, Starcloud, backed by Nvidia, has already flown a powerful Nvidia chip into orbit in November 2025 and trained a small AI model on it there.

The hard parts

Not everyone is convinced yet. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has called the idea unrealistic for this decade, and the engineering problems are real, as NPR has explained. Space is cold, but it is also empty, so a hot computer cannot blow its heat away with fans and air. It has to send the heat out slowly through large panels. A broken server cannot be fixed by a technician who walks over with a spare part. Launches still cost a lot, although Google’s researchers expect prices to fall below $200 a kilogram by the mid-2030s, low enough to make orbit compete with the ground.

Space is also getting crowded. The European Space Agency estimates there are more than 1.2 million pieces of debris larger than one centimeter in orbit, and more than 50,000 larger than ten centimeters. Each one travels faster than a bullet. A million new satellites would need firm rules for traffic, safe disposal and clean-up, and those rules have to come from governments working together.

The rest of the space economy

Data centers and internet are only two parts of a much larger picture. The World Economic Forum and McKinsey estimate that the space economy was worth about $630 billion in 2023 and could reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, growing faster than the world economy as a whole. Here are the main parts.

Launch is the road to space. Rockets that land and fly again have cut the cost of reaching orbit, and every other space business depends on that road getting cheaper.

Earth observation is the planet’s eyes. Companies like Planet photograph the whole Earth every day, so farmers can check their crops, cities can track new buildings and water authorities can spot leaks and dry wells from above.

Navigation is the planet’s clock and compass. GPS and the European, Chinese and Russian systems give every phone, plane, ship and power grid an exact time and place.

Factories in orbit make things Earth cannot. In February 2024 a small capsule from Varda Space landed in Utah carrying crystals of an HIV drug that were grown in weightlessness. Medicines, fiber optic cable and computer chips may one day be made better in space than on the ground.

Power stations in space could send energy home. In 2023 a test satellite from Caltech beamed a small amount of power down to a rooftop in California. The amount was tiny, but it showed that solar power collected in orbit can be aimed at a receiver on Earth.

Space stations are the hotels and labs. The International Space Station is due to retire around 2030, and NASA plans to replace it by renting space on stations owned and run by private companies.

The Moon and Mars are the next building sites. Landing pads, power plants, roads and water plants on the Moon will be needed for people to stay there. The Moon guidePDF and the Mars guidePDF on Jordan PPP explain how they can be built and run.

Mining and clean-up close the loop. Water ice on the Moon can be turned into drinking water, air and rocket fuel, and asteroids hold metals. Companies are also building spacecraft that catch old satellites and debris and pull them out of orbit.

Space has always been a partnership

Almost every success in space so far began as a partnership with government. In 2006 NASA stopped designing every rocket itself and started paying companies to reach set goals, then buying cargo deliveries to the space station as a service. SpaceX developed its Falcon 9 rocket this way. A NASA cost model estimated that building it the traditional government way would have cost about $4 billion, while the actual cost of Falcon 9 and the earlier Falcon 1 together came to about $390 million, a figure NASA checked.

The same model is now used for the Moon. Under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, NASA works with American companies to deliver science and equipment to the Moon’s surface and orbit. The companies own the landers and NASA pays for each delivery, the same way a city might buy clean water from a private plant.

This is exactly how a public-private partnership, or PPP, works. A PPP is a long agreement in which a government and private companies build and run a public service together. The government sets the goals, protects the public and agrees to pay for results. Private partners bring money, speed and new technology, and they carry the risk of building and running the asset. The PPPs on the Moon post explains how the model fits lunar power, water and landing pads.

What a space PPP looks like

Data centers in orbit will need the same mix. Governments control the things a private company cannot get alone: the right to use radio signals, safe orbits, launch sites, traffic rules and the duty to clean up. Governments are also the biggest buyers of what space produces, from weather data and secure communications to AI computing for hospitals, schools and ministries.

A space PPP could work like this. A government, or a group of governments, agrees to buy computing power, internet capacity or Earth images from a satellite network for 15 or 20 years. That long promise lets a private partner raise the money to build, launch and run it. The partner is paid only when the service works, and must bring each satellite down safely at the end of its life. Tokenization can split the project into small digital shares, so ordinary people and small funds can own a piece of a satellite network instead of only the largest investors.

In the story of the world’s biggest $500 trillion computer, roads, grids, pipes and cables join into one machine. Satellites are its wireless network, and data centers in orbit could become some of its largest processors, powered directly by the Sun.

Jordan’s place in space

Jordan is already part of this story. Its first satellite, JY1-SAT, was built by young Jordanian engineers with the support of the Crown Prince Foundation and launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on December 3, 2018. It was named after the radio call sign of the late King Hussein. On April 23, 2026, Ambassador Dina Kawar signed the Artemis Accords at NASA’s headquarters, making Jordan the 63rd country to join the shared rules for exploring the Moon and Mars.

The desert of Wadi Rum looks so much like Mars that Hollywood filmed The Martian there. A privately run research site in Wadi Rum has already hosted mock Mars missions, called PETRA1 and PETRA2, in 2024 and 2025. That same desert could become a test range for rovers, building robots and solar power before they fly. Aqaba adds a sea port, strong sunshine for solar farms and data centers in planning, and Jordan’s high, dry land suits ground stations that talk to satellites.

The country has $86 billion of PPP and infrastructure projects in development, including $46 billion in Aqaba. Article 15 of its PPP Law lets any private company take its own PPP idea to the Ministry of Investment or a public authority, so a space test range, a ground station park or an AI data center can be proposed directly. The mission of Jordan PPP is to build the most advanced PPP system in the world, and www.JordanPPP.com offers 96 organization guides and 23 sector guides for free. To take your team through the space opportunity, book a presentation.