Google is preparing to launch its first prototype satellite to test whether artificial intelligence hardware can operate in orbit, as part of a research initiative called Project Suncatcher, the company said in a blog post on Friday.
Project Suncatcher, announced last year, is exploring whether space could eventually host scalable machine-learning infrastructure.
In low Earth orbit, satellites can access near-constant sunlight, generating up to eight times more solar power than on Earth, and could theoretically be linked into constellations capable of handling large AI workloads together, Google said.
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The upcoming test satellite, developed in partnership with Planet, will fly on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission to gather in-orbit data on how Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) withstand the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space.
Travis Beals, senior director for Paradigms of Intelligence at Google, said the team was working towards its next milestone in 2027 and had released a video series detailing its findings and remaining engineering challenges.
On hardware survival, Google said a rocket trip to low Earth orbit lasts about 10 minutes but subjects spacecraft to vibration and gravitational loads up to 10 times normal, with tests shaking a satellite on all three axes to mimic launch conditions; its TPU chips held up.
Radiation testing at UC Davis's Crocker Nuclear Laboratory found its Trillium TPUs could withstand a radiation dose far exceeding what they would receive during a five-year space mission, though errors such as bit-flips remain a challenge.
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On cooling, Google noted that the absence of airflow in the vacuum of space rules out conventional methods, pushing engineers towards combinations of heat pipes and radiators, tested so far in a thermal vacuum chamber simulating orbital conditions.
For future satellite networks, each carrying dozens of TPU chips in orbiting clusters, Google said maintaining high-bandwidth laser links between satellites would require extraordinary precision, comparable to hitting a coin-sized target from miles away while both ends are in motion, a capability it intends to begin testing in 2027.
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