Next-Generation Space AI Infrastructure
OTIS packages thermal control, burst-power support, and radiation-aware fault handling into a unified integration layer — enabling more onboard AI without forcing a larger spacecraft bus.
Terrestrial AI depends on convection, facility power, and tolerant infrastructure. In orbit, every assumption changes — and the systems that fail to adapt leave performance on the table.
In vacuum, heat can only leave by radiation — not convection. Radiator area is scarce, spacecraft surfaces compete for solar collection and thermal rejection, and power is intermittent across eclipses.
Ionizing radiation and energetic particles flip bits, corrupt memory, degrade devices, and can trigger destructive overcurrent events — without a single visible crash, inference results quietly change.
Spacecraft batteries and regulators cannot absorb every AI burst peak directly. Oversizing the bus and battery for peak inference loads wastes mass that could fund additional capability.
CubeSat and smallsat missions operate under tight kilogram constraints. Separate enclosures, coolers, and power regulators pile up dead mass — infrastructure that carries only one function per kilogram.
The OTIS modular stack co-locates structure, thermal transport, power conditioning, and supervisory control — so no component exists solely to support another.
The radiator panel serves dual duty as primary structure, eliminating the need for a separate chassis. Surface coatings are optimized for low solar absorptivity and high IR emissivity to maximize passive heat rejection.
Short AI inference bursts produce heat spikes that would otherwise force radiator oversizing. PCM tiles absorb transient peaks, allowing rejection hardware to be sized against realistic average loads rather than worst-case instantaneous demand.
AI workloads are bursty by nature. A removable supercapacitor cartridge handles short high-current demands locally, smoothing the profile seen by the spacecraft battery and reducing peak bus stress.
Rather than relying solely on rad-hard compute, OTIS implements watchdog monitoring, ECC memory paths, current limiting, staged power domains, and graceful recovery logic — enabling higher-performance commercial processors to operate credibly in orbit.
Integrated cold plate, vapor spreader, heat pipes, and structural radiator provide a short, low-resistance path from compute die to space-facing surface — no pumped loops, no external bulkheads.
GaN power management and supercapacitor cartridges buffer peak inference loads, reducing transient draw on the spacecraft bus and enabling sustained AI operation without battery oversizing.
Supervisory logic detects SEU-induced errors, contains latch-up events through fast current limiting, and initiates recovery — from checkpoint restore to full-board reset — without ground intervention.
The AI compute card is mission-configurable — NPU, FPGA, CPU, or heterogeneous — enabling real-time data triage, autonomous decision-making, and low-latency inference without ground-loop latency.
Standardized interfaces let customers adopt only the capabilities they need — from the base structural panel through compute support, burst-power module, and optional deployable radiator wing.
Supervisory software decides when to run high-power inference, when to cap clocks, when to checkpoint, and when to defer lower-priority work — keeping the stack within thermal and electrical margins throughout the orbit.
A radiation event may produce a silent memory error that changes an inference result without appearing catastrophic. OTIS addresses the full failure mode spectrum.
| Effect | Impact on AI | OTIS Mitigation | Layer |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEU — Single Event Upset | Silent corruption of model parameters, intermediate calculations, or inference outputs | ECC memory paths, watchdog validation, checkpoint restore, retry logic | Compute |
| SEL — Single Event Latch-up | Destructive overcurrent event capable of permanently damaging the processor | Fast current limiting, staged power domains, supervisory disconnects, transient energy buffering | Power |
| TID — Total Ionizing Dose | Gradual performance degradation and reduced lifetime margin | Thermal and power margining, health monitoring telemetry, modular compute card replacement | System |
| DDD — Displacement Damage | Altered semiconductor characteristics and changing sensor behavior over mission life | Telemetry-driven derating, modular architecture enabling subsystem replacement without full redesign | System |
A shared base panel keeps integration simple. Optional modules unlock higher-burst, higher-rejection, or higher-resilience configurations as mission requirements evolve.
Structure, radiator, and GaN PMAD in one flight-ready unit. The entry point for any OTIS integration.
Mission-specific AI processor — NPU, FPGA, CPU, or heterogeneous — sized to the inference workload.
Removable burst-power module for high-peak inference bursts without oversizing the spacecraft battery.
Phase-change thermal buffer and optional deployable radiator interface for high-burst or high-average thermal missions.
OTIS is being built by founders working at the intersection of thermal systems, hardware integration, and next-generation compute infrastructure for space.
Brady is a 3rd year undergrad studying Electrical Engineering at MIT. He specilizes in systems and materials engineering and is the current co-founder of two other succesfull startups.
Daniel is a 3rd year undergrad studying Aerospace Engineering at MIT.
OTIS works with satellite integrators, hosted-payload providers, and mission architects at the earliest stage of design. Reach out to begin a technical briefing.