OrbitalForge / about
Designing satellites that have to actually work.
OrbitalForge is a fast, opinionated workbench for designing the AI-payload satellites that will sit at the heart of multi-planetary infrastructure — orbital data centers, solar-power constellations, edge inference fleets, and the building blocks of programs like TERAFAB: terawatt-class, space-based industrial capacity. The design space is real and unfair: eclipse geometry, drag at 500 km, SRP at 0.4 m²/kg, EGM96 70×70 gravity, and a Starship payload bay you actually have to fit into. Most tools either hand-wave the physics or hide it behind a desktop GUI nobody opens twice. OrbitalForge does neither.
Pick an orbit, size a solar array, hang a compute payload off it, point a laser at the ground — and OrbitalForge turns your design into a NASA GMAT R2026a script, propagates it through the full production force model, scores the result against the SBSP and FCC envelope, and tracks the Δv budget you would actually pay for station-keeping. Every primitive cites a primary source. Every run is shareable as a public page anyone can open without signing in. The goal is short: a tool engineers reach for when the question is "can this design close?" — and an on-ramp for the next generation of orbital-infrastructure builders.
Physics summary
OrbitalForge is a satellite-design simulator where the physics is real — every orbit, eclipse, and Δv is propagated by NASA GMAT R2026a in script-mode (NRL-MSISE-00 drag, EGM96 70×70 gravity, spherical SRP, Sun + Moon as third bodies, EclipseLocator umbral/penumbral events), and every physical constant in the codebase carries a primary-source citation (NASA SBSP 2024, IERS conventions, IAU 2015, SpaceX FCC SAT-LOA-20260108-00016). The dry-mass model derives the array mass from the user's specific-power slider against the SBSP 300 W/kg target, and a per-orbit prograde station-keeping ImpulsiveBurn closes the orbit against drag and SRP eccentricity-pumping — for the canonical 100 kW / 300 m² / 500 km sun-sync reference design that gives 0.075 m/s of Δv per day (~27 m/s/year, vs. ISS ~80 m/s/year), 36.6 % umbral fraction across 45 eclipse events, 63.35 kW average delivered power, and a closed orbit (final SMA holding at 6 878.07 km, eccentricity at 1.3 × 10⁻⁴) — numbers an aerospace engineer can actually defend, not toy approximations.