Google plans to launch its first Project Suncatcher test satellite on October 1, putting four of its tensor processing units into orbit. The refrigerator-sized spacecraft will ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission and is intended to reveal whether ordinary data-center AI chips can survive and operate in space.
The satellite, called MVP, was built by Planet Labs and adapted for Google’s hardware. Its solar panels provide roughly one kilowatt of power, far below a terrestrial AI data center. Google will run Gemini models on the chips to test inference, radiation tolerance and the effects of launch vibration and high acceleration.
Cooling is the immediate constraint. The system conducts heat through aluminum and copper pipes to a radiator, but it can run the TPUs for only about 15 minutes before shutting them down to cool. The test is expected to operate for a few months.
Suncatcher’s longer-term concept is a network of solar-powered AI satellites connected by high-speed laser links. Google still has two custom satellite launches planned for 2027, but says it will take years for the work to move from a project to a product. This first mission is therefore a limited engineering experiment, not an orbital data-center deployment.