The Infrastructure That Makes Orbital Compute Inevitable

This second essay in the orbital-compute series asks what has to exist before the idea becomes infrastructure. The answer is not a bigger server rack in orbit. It is a maintained industrial regime: platforms that can be serviced, shells that can be governed, debris that can be removed, hardware that can be retired responsibly, and networks that let rovers, habitats, relays, and off-world machines keep working when Earth is delayed or unavailable.