Google’s Suncatcher prototype, a satellite carrying four TPUs, is online after launching earlier this month on a SpaceX Falcon 9.
What it is
It’s a test for future clusters of satellites running AI inference in orbit. It makes up to 1 kW, so it can only run a TPU for about 20 minutes at a time. For the first prompt, engineers asked the onboard Gemma 4 model for a haiku about space. It answered: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.”
What they’re really testing
Radiation. Bit flips can corrupt data without setting off normal alarms. Ground tests say inference should hold up better than training, and now they get real numbers.
My take
Data centers in orbit sound crazy until you remember power and cooling are the hard limits down here. I want to see the bit-flip data.
God Bless, and May the Source Be with You!
