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Google senior director who leads Project Suncatcher.
Google's first orbital TPU satellite can run its chips for only about 15 minutes before its radiators catch up, Ars Technica reports. Power is the easy part in orbit, so radiator area decides how many chips each satellite can carry.
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Google's orbital compute paper needs Starship to lift 370,000 tons to reach $200-a-kilogram launches, about 180 flights a year for a decade. Its first TPU in orbit will run in 15-minute bursts while Google tests whether a satellite can supply a kilowatt of steady power and keep the chip cool.
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Google's Project Suncatcher is launching four processors that can run Gemini for only 15 minutes before they must shut down to cool. Heat, launch mass and downlink stand between that payload and the orbital data centers SpaceX pitched when it went public in June.
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Google launches its first Project Suncatcher satellite on October 1 with four TPUs on about 1kW of solar, roughly one data center server's worth of compute. It can show whether the chips stay cool in orbit, but the laser links any capacity case needs wait for a two-satellite test in 2027.
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Google's MVP satellite takes four TPUs and about 1 kW of solar power into orbit to test whether AI chips survive radiation and shed their own heat. Its results will show whether rebooting away bit flips and cooling through a radiator can carry into the constellations Google has already sketched.
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Google flies one server's worth of TPUs on 1 kilowatt of solar power on Oct. 1, its first hardware test for orbital AI data centers. The flight tests chip survival and cooling while SpaceX's and Blue Origin's far larger constellations still wait on FCC review.
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