devlog #1

so this started because i read a white paper. not something i do every day, but i came across the starcloud/lumen orbit paper called “why we should train ai in space” from 2024 and i couldn’t stop thinking about it. the idea of orbital ai data centers, satellites doing machine learning in low earth orbit, solar power that never turns off, no cooling costs. it just clicked something in my brain.

i spent probably the first hour just reading and taking notes. what would it actually look like to monitor something like that? like if you were the person watching these satellites, what would your dashboard show? solar power, battery percentage, radiator temperature, whether the satellite is in sunlight or in eclipse. and then the orbit itself, the actual position over the earth in real time.

so i decided to build it. a full mission control dashboard, the kind nasa uses, except for a simulated version of what starcloud might actually run. i picked open mct which is nasa’s open source mission control framework, and started building on top of it.

five hours in and i’ve got more done than i expected. there’s a telemetry server running in python that simulates four different satellites with real physics, power generation, battery charge/discharge, thermal modeling. the frontend connects to it live over websockets and plots the data in real time on an accelerated simulation clock so you can actually watch the orbit happen.

the thing i’m most excited about right now is the 3d globe view i just started. you open a satellite in the dashboard and you get a realistic earth with the satellite orbiting it, colored gold when it’s in sunlight and dim blue when it’s in eclipse. that part isn’t done yet but the bones are there.

more to come soon