Reflections from SmallSat 2025: Leading the Era of Edge Compute

At the Small Satellite Conference 2025, we brought space-based edge computing to life and took the conversation to a webinar hosted by Payload, where our Co-Founder & CEO, Gaurav Bajaj, joined industry peers to unpack what “orbit-native intelligence” really means for mission economics and operations. 

Inside the Conversation

The session, moderated by Mo Islam, CEO & Co-Founder of Arkaea Media Group, brought together some of the most forward-thinking minds in the industry. Alongside Gaurav were Jason Cerundolo (Colossus), Stefan Amberger (Tilebox), and Aiden O’Leary (Modulate Media). Together, they explored how companies are building scalable, full-stack in-orbit solutions that make missions faster, leaner, and lower-risk. 

Watch the webinar: Path to Profitability: Leading the Era of Edge Compute 

What we shared

The Shift to On-orbit Compute Unlocks New Use Cases

• Processing space data in space, leveraging onboard compute, enables near real-time intelligence to be delivered to users on Earth, reducing response times from hours or days to just a few minutes. This is particularly impactful for time-sensitive applications such as disaster response and rapid decision-making.

• The ability to rapidly process data and deliver actionable insight within about 7 minutes from image capture (with current demos achieving 21 minutes on average, and a target of 7 minutes) demonstrates the maturity and promise of the new tech stack.
  

Enabling Broader Impact Beyond the Space Industry

• By dramatically reducing data transmission latency, LPL’s work moves value creation beyond traditional space sector customers to real users on Earth. Fast, processed information supports new applications and markets previously unreachable by legacy satellite operations.

• On-orbit processing shifts the business model from just downlinking raw data to delivering insights, bringing space-derived information to mainstream use cases.

Technical and Operational Lessons

• Building edge AI for space requires lightweight, highly optimized models; uplink and downlink bandwidth are both chokepoints (not just downlink), necessitating novel software and operational practices not present in prior architectures.

• Infrastructure advances now make it possible to develop and uplink new applications post-launch, providing mission flexibility and adaptability. Unlike legacy "preload and forget" approaches, developers can now iterate and deploy weekly, just like cloud apps on Earth.

• Demonstrations proved that integrating hardware from Colossus, orchestration via Tilebox, and application development by LPL accelerates the delivery of insights and broadens addressable use cases for customers.

Shortening Latency and Lowering Costs

• Latency remains the most significant, most urgent pain point for end users; every opportunity to collapse the time from collection to insight unlocks more market and customer value.

• As the stack matures and is deployed across more missions, the unit economics will trend toward delivering "insights at the cost of images," creating a new standard for value and accessibility in space intelligence.

  
  

Industry-wide Outlook

• Early adopters are tilting commercial, with "move fast and reduce risk" as their priority, while government interest remains significant, especially for domestic and security-focused missions.

• The edge computation model makes space missions more cost-efficient, enables new revenue streams, and supports autonomous or semi-autonomous mission concepts that were either too expensive or infeasible in the past.

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For us at Little Place Labs, it was an opportunity to share our perspective on how space-based edge computing is moving from concept to reality, and why it’s central to the future of space operations. The discussion touched on both the technical and economic benefits, showing how in-orbit compute is enabling a new generation of smarter, more autonomous missions.

We’re grateful to Payload and SmallSat for creating a platform to bring these conversations to the forefront, and our partners Colossus and Tilebox. We’re excited to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with edge computing in space.