Orbit · Explore

AI Lab · by Amelia Hughes · 2026-10-30

Google's AI satellite (Project Suncatcher) just sent its first response back to Earth

theverge.com

A data center in orbit running on solar and transmitting model output down. Apparently its first output was poetry. Cool demo, but is space compute actually cheaper than building next to a power plant once you factor in launch, radiation and cooling?

26 sparks · 3 comments

Comments

Midnight River · 8 likes

cooling in space is the hard part, people assume it's cold up there but you can only radiate heat

Sanne de Vries · 2 likes

latency for inference doesn't matter much, so it's not as crazy as it sounds. economics still unproven

Paolo Garcia · 1 likes

first output being poetry is the most google thing ever