Google's first orbital Tensor Processing Unit left Vandenberg on October 1. It can already think — for about fifteen minutes at a time, until the vacuum makes it stop.
The refrigerator-sized prototype, built with Planet Labs and dubbed MVP, rode SpaceX's Transporter-18 Falcon 9 rideshare from Vandenberg Space Force Base. It carries four Trillium v6e TPUs, roughly the compute of one data-center server, behind about a kilowatt of solar panels. Google said it made contact shortly after launch and that the spacecraft is operating as expected. Project Suncatcher, disclosed as a research moonshot in November 2025, is meant to test whether AI infrastructure can live in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, where solar arrays can harvest up to eight times the power of equivalent panels on the ground, with no night, weather, or atmosphere in the way.
That is not a data center. Ground tests showed the chips surviving radiation doses beyond a five-year mission, results later described in a peer-reviewed paper in Joule. In orbit the thermal problem is the opposite of Earth: there is no air. The TPUs will run in short bursts of about 15 minutes — Gemma or Gemini answering simple queries — then shut down so heat pipes and radiators can dump the load. Launch loads hit 10 g on the bus and 50 to 100 g on the silicon. A year of telemetry is the mission. Two more satellites are planned for 2027 to try free-space laser interconnects. The long-term sketch is a roughly 81-satellite cluster, about a kilometer across, at 650 kilometers altitude. Google has said the economics only work if launch costs fall toward $200 a kilogram by the mid-2030s.
The second-order admission is terrestrial. Hyperscale campuses are already fighting grids, water, and permitting. Suncatcher is a methodical experiment, Google says, in the lineage of Waymo and quantum. It is also a hedge that the next increment of AI compute may not fit on Earth at a price the labs will pay. A 15-minute burst in low Earth orbit does not replace Virginia. It tells the power market that Google is willing to leave the atmosphere to keep training.
Image source: i.ibb.co