Gen3 spec sheet: 250 kW per satellite, 10 Tb/s, onboard edge compute
From the Space digest for 2026-10-04
What happened: SatNews (Oct 4, 8:27 PM ET): technical specifications for SpaceX's next-generation Starlink "Gen3" satellites were disclosed Oct 1 — 250 kW per satellite, 10 Tb/s throughput, onboard edge compute, framed in trade coverage as "AI satellites."
What's genuinely new: the per-satellite numbers behind the Gen3 era are now on the record. They pair directly with Flight 14's Sep 28 deployment of 26 production V3s and matter beyond connectivity: onboard compute is the SpaceX flank of the orbital-data-center market (Google's Suncatcher arithmetic pegged that market at ~1,600 Starship launches; the Gen3 FCC filing's 100k-satellite scale is the mass math). Provenance: trade-grade single source (SatNews); the primary disclosure itself has not passed through our feed — verify against the FCC filing before weighting the 250 kW figure.
Watch: primary-source confirmation; what the onboard compute actually serves (Starlink's own routing/AI functions vs third-party workloads — the difference between a smart router and a data-center node).
Links: SatNews