The public story around orbital compute still focuses on launch cost. That matters, but it is not the cost that determines whether a platform survives into maturity.
The harder question is maintenance cadence. Every high-orbit facility depends on a service economy made of inspection loops, module swaps, robotic handling, alignment checks, spare-part staging, and scheduled hardware retirement. Once that service layer becomes thin or irregular, the platform stops being a datacenter and starts becoming deferred risk.
This changes the business model in three ways. First, operators have to plan around service windows in the same way terrestrial operators plan around power and cooling. Second, the real moat shifts toward logistics reliability instead of raw compute density. Third, repair fleets become strategic assets rather than secondary vendors.
That maintenance economy is also where markets begin to form around orbital compute. Spare bus manufacturers, relay scrub contractors, shield inspection firms, and orbital tow services all become part of the same stack. A server farm in orbit is not one business. It is a compact industrial district that has to keep paying for its own continued geometry.
The practical implication is simple. The first generation of orbital compute may be financed by launch narratives, but the second generation will be decided by service discipline.