Some orbital compute jobs never reach the core because core access is no longer treated as a neutral scheduling choice.
Operators increasingly reserve their deepest thermal layers for workloads that justify migration cost, continuity guarantees, and shielding priority. Short-lived experimentation, unverified burst demand, and politically unstable contracts are often held in outer bands where derate is cheaper to absorb.
This makes orbital compute look hierarchical from the inside. Customers may buy capacity from one platform, but the best capacity inside that platform is still rationed by trust, duration, and strategic value.