orbital

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

Earth-bound data centers are going to be around for a while, but Google is just one company looking to put them into space.

In 2018 I spent a weekend making an agar.io clone: a planet that followed the mouse with acceleration...

China completed six orbital launches in less than a week with a 100 percent success rate after a Kinetica-1 carrier rocket successfully sent nine satellites into orbit on Sunday afternoon, highlighting the country's…

I think we are going to lose the ability to use certain orbits."

2026 SC is a small Aten NEO whose orbit lies almost entirely inside Earth's, ranging from 0.564 au at perihelion (between Mercury's and Venus's distan

SpaceX's Starship rocket thundered into the sky over South Texas early Monday. It was the 14th test flight of the world's most powerful launch vehicle. This time, however, the rocket's massive upper stage squeezed out some extra oomph from its Raptor engines and accelerated to orbital velocity. On all of Starship's previous flights, SpaceX intentionally dialed back the full capability of the rocket to fly a suborbital trajectory, slow enough for Earth's gravity to pull the vehicle back into the atmosphere before it could complete a full lap around the planet. After several successful suborbital flights in a row, SpaceX officials decided this launch should go all the way to low-Earth orbit. And it did. What's more, SpaceX packed 26 of the company's newest generation of Starlink broadband satellites into the rocket's cargo bay. One by one, the flat-packed satellites —too large to fit inside SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket —were released from Starship's payload deployer using a system of pulleys and cables to eject the satellites overboard like a Pez dispenser spits out candy. Read full article Comments

Google is taking its first step toward making Project Suncatcher a reality. Announced last year, Suncatcher is Google's "moonshot" effort to design orbital AI data centers, which AI boosters like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have pitched as an alternative to divisive terrestrial data centers . Google's first experimental satellite will launch on October 1 with the aim of validating Google's vision for a constellation of AI satellites . 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. On Earth, a data center will run thousands of these chips, which consume massive amounts of power—one of the reasons putting solar-powered AI hardware in space is so attractive. Google’s latest moonshot to put machine learning in space. MVP is starting small, with solar panels that supply only about one kilowatt of power, The New York Times reports. That's enough to power a microwave or a hair dryer. Google did not build the satellite from scratch. While the AI hardware inside is Google's, the spacecraft comes from a satellite imagery firm called Planet Labs. The initial plan was to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but Google wanted to accelerate its efforts. So the company opted to integrate its chips into a satellite that Planet Labs had already built for an early test. Read full article Comments

The 2013 sci-fi blockbuster film Gravity , starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, popularized the notion of the Kessler syndrome. In the movie, Russia shoots down a defunct satellite and creates a cloud of debris, leading to serious tension in orbit. The movie is fantastic, a true thriller, and while some liberties were taken with the depiction of outer space, the basic premise of a cascading series of collisions rendering orbits too cluttered with debris to be usable is valid. The idea was first proposed by NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais nearly half a century ago. Still, the movie was science fiction, right? Read full article Comments