Google sent one of its advanced AI chips into space for the first time on Thursday. The prototype satellite launched from California aboard a SpaceX rocket.
The satellite was built by Planet Labs. It carries a Google Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, the company's rival to Nvidia's graphics processors.
The mission is part of Project Suncatcher. This is Google's plan to build large computing clusters in orbit around Earth.
"We've done testing on the ground, but you know, there's no test that's completely as good as the real thing," said Travis Beals, the Google executive who manages the project.
How the Test Satellite Will Work
The satellite must supply a kilowatt of steady power to the chip and keep it cool. It will also run a series of AI models to check for problems.
Once it is ready, the satellite will turn on its TPU in 15-minute bursts. This helps avoid straining its power and cooling systems.
The satellite uses a standard Planet Labs design. The two companies plan another demo next year with two satellites built for heavier computing work. Those satellites will try to work together through a laser communication link.
Google was not the only space AI customer on the flight. The rocket carried more than 100 payloads, including missions from startups Satlyt and Cowboy Space Company.
Beals called Suncatcher a "long-term moonshot." Google pictures a future orbital data center made of 81 satellites flying in close formation and processing data together.
"We're trying to look ahead to not just what workloads exist today, but where they will be in five years," Beals said.
Google Study Looks at Launch Costs
On Thursday, Google also released a peer-reviewed version of its white paper on orbital data centers. It will be published in the journal Joule.
The researchers say the paper is not an economic feasibility study. However, it looks at how rocket launch prices could fall over time.
Google is a major investor in SpaceX. The authors say SpaceX has cut launch costs by about 20% a year since its Falcon 1 rocket. They believe prices near $200 per kilogram are possible by 2035.
To reach that level, the paper estimates Starship would need to carry 370,000 tons of payload to orbit. That would mean about 1,800 launches over 10 years, or 180 per year, if each flight carries 200 metric tons.
Starship has never flown more than five times in a single year. Elon Musk has suggested it could reach an hourly flight rate in 2029.
The updated research also found that Google's chips are likely to survive space radiation. The company redid its particle accelerator tests after finding the earlier setup gave the chips more shielding than they would have in orbit.
The new tests showed slightly more errors in the chips' logic circuits. Still, Google says the chips can handle large inference workloads over a satellite's five-year life.
"The error rate is very low if you're thinking about typical inference operations, right? Like one in a million," Beals said. He added that the rate was already a problem for huge training runs using thousands of chips for months.
