Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1

Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1 arstechnica.com

Google's experimental orbital data center will have four TPUs and only run for 15 minutes at a time.

51 points•sbulaev•6 days ago•96 comments•

#data #orbital #center #orbital data #data center #suncatcher #test #googles

96 comments

It still doesn’t make sense to me. Technological progress will likely only accelerate. These will be outdated within 2 years easily, and you can’t even recover the chips. The only benefits are the unlimited power without the bottlenecks on earth, lack of political pressure of course, and the low latency for processing satellite data since it doesn’t need to be sent down to earth. These don’t seem beneficial enough to waste this money. It would be good to hear from someone who knows more about this.

dgellow5 days ago

Not just that, you’re wasting so much compute due to the risk of bit flips. That the case for any hardware you currently have in space, you need some correction mechanism which generally mean computing the same thing multiple times just to ensure correctness. And the cooling story without an atmosphere is also another obvious pretty massive problem. And the risk of losing an entire payload if the rocket fails. Etc…

I see it exactly like Hyperloop, a cynical attempt at putting political pressure. Hyperloop was a known absurd concept that Musk released to block the development of public transport in the US. And that worked. For compute in space, it’s a way to be able to say to municipalities and states „if you don’t let us use the land how we want, with no oversight, no problem, we won’t negotiate with you and just go to space“

computomatic5 days ago

GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.

For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.

Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.

Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.

For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.

At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.

lovich4 days ago

> In space, that doesn’t apply.

How does capacity not apply in space? You can’t just boost a gpu into orbit and it’ll start running. It needs to be hooked into power and cooling infrastructure still and that will always be limited by how much infrastructure you have up there.

r_lee5 days ago

> progress will likely only accelerate

I'm guessing this is part of the whole idea; to get data before its actually doable, and the cost is worth the early data to help with future development

hn_submit5 days ago

Elon lets out a fart and everyone's running after it. This is another misguided attempt to pump-up their share price or give clueless investors the feeling that Google is leading the A.I. pack.

Orbital data centers are a stupid idea conjured up by Musk when he was taking mescaline or ketamine. Anyone with half a brain knows this doesn't make sense.

mediumdeviation5 days ago

This definitely feels like Hyperloop, but for data centers instead - a really cool idea that falls apart the moment it meets contact with reality. The most bizarre thing is how any of this and the Hyperloop got any amount of funding and development beyond just an initial feasibility report.

hn_submit5 days ago

The idea of "orbital data centers" was conjured up merely to justify Musk's merging of xAI and SpaceX. I thought that was obvious to everyone but apparently there are still plenty of little-minded people that see Musk as some sort of God and suck up every lie he shoots from the hip.

Musk is merging all of his failed enterprises (Tesla, xAI, Boring Company, Twitter) into the one that has been relatively succesful, SpaceX. Mostly because of Starlink, the idea for which he himself didn't even come up with and was initially seen as an afterthought to get some revenue.

milleramp5 days ago

It's research to collect data, and it's not your money, what do you care?

9dev5 days ago

Because it takes so much attention away from projects that would be worthwhile.

rganesan5 days ago

The idea was from Google in a November 2025 paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19468). Musk started talking about this only later in December 2025.

kadoban5 days ago

> The satellite, dubbed MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator. Inside, it has four of Google’s custom TPU AI accelerators, which are used to train AI models and run inference to generate tokens for AI workloads.

Yeah, this is a science-fair project. They threw some cards in a box and are paying someone to launch it to generate idiotic news articles.

spandrew5 days ago

There were a lot of YouTube science-fluencers talking about how dumb this idea was. Google themselves called it a Moonshot (har har).

Curious to see if the experiment changes our understanding of space radiators at a certain scale for non-space exploration purposes.

tpetry5 days ago

Its running for 15 minutes and then must shut down for a long time to cool down. Thats exactly why those "science-fluencers" said its a dumb idea. This is far away from proving that its a viable idea.

red75prime5 days ago

They use passive cooling in their MVP satellite (for the sake of simplicity, probably). This, naturally, severely limits the heat rejection capacity.

moralestapia5 days ago

Source for that?

Edit: @kieranmaine thanks! Wonder how long they have to wait to turn them on again.

sdcfgy5 days ago

I suspect it’ll go in the trash like their previous experimental infrastructure ideas did.

karahime5 days ago

A lot of their experimental infrastructure has influenced later work.

trhway5 days ago

It is 700w of heat radiating by 1m2 at 70C ( ie one GPU can sit on such a radiator) What is not to work ok here?

nine_k5 days ago

No air. No convection, only radiation.

lubujackson5 days ago

Just call it SkyNet and lean into the evil.

MarsZebra5 days ago

Golden Dome is the name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

It's a ground-targeting offensive system to be clear, not just missile defense.

eutropia5 days ago

I am curious about the physical layout for moving the highly-concentrated heat in the GPUs out to the diffuse radiation panels required to keep them at operating temperature. Would it need something like a liquid cooling loop coupled with large radiators?

and also curious how it's cheaper to send all the expensive silicon to space and throw it away when its obsolete compared to just racking it in the midwest somewhere?

ChrisArchitect6 days ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830606

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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