Google’s prototype of its orbital compute satellite took off today onboard a SpaceX rocket launched from California — the first time the tech giant has sent one of its advanced chips into space. Built by Planet Labs, the satellite will prove that a Google Tensor Processing Unit, its competitor to Nvidia’s GPUs, can function in space. That means supplying a kilowatt of continuous power, cooling the chip, and running a series of models through their paces to see if anything goes wrong.
Once commissioned, the satellite will fire up its TPU in 15-minute bursts to avoid straining the satellite’s power and thermal management systems. This satellite is based on a standard platform built by Planet Labs, but the two companies are working on a demo expected to take flight next year that will see two satellites more purpose-built for advanced compute. Those future versions will attempt to collaborate via a laser communications link.
Suncatcher isn’t the only space AI payload on this SpaceX rocket, which is launching more than one hundred different payloads, including missions from Satlyt and Cowboy Space Company. What sets the Google initiative apart from those startups (and indeed from SpaceX itself) is that it’s a long-term project. The focus of this “long-term moonshot,” as Beals puts it, is on building for the space infrastructure and AI workloads that will exist in the future.
The company envisions a network of 81 satellites flying in close formation, processing in parallel. That’s largely because the rockets required to scale up orbital data centers in a cost-effective way don’t yet exist. On Thursday, Google also released a peer-reviewed version of its white paper on orbital data centers, one of the most rigorous analyses available of how compute gets to orbit.
The paper will be published in Joule. One of the paper’s most notable aspects is how Google thinks about access to space. Although the researchers stress their analysis isn’t an economic feasibility study, it offers an interesting picture of how the company sees rockets becoming cheaper over time.
Like all data center companies, Google is looking to SpaceX to get its spacecraft off the ground. (Google is also a major investor in SpaceX.) Arguing that Elon Musk’s rocket builders have achieved a price-reducing “learning curve” of about 20% a year since they launched the Falcon 1 rocket, the authors believe it’s reasonable to expect the company to deliver launch prices close to $200 per kilogram by 2035. What will it take to do that? Based on the amount of payload launched by the Falcon 9, they think a similar cost-reduction trajectory will require Starship to fly 370,000 tons of payload into orbit.
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