First response from the Project Suncatcher prototype satellite
blog.google38 points by praccu a day ago
38 points by praccu a day ago
This was a completely vapid article. I expected some technical details at least, but instead it's an LLM generated poem confirming it worked in a short interval, which nobody doubts it would. All eyes are on long term heat dissipation and the impact of radiation and success of radiation hardening meterials and processes.
That was a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830606 This is just a status update, which the title is pretty clear about.
I still can't think of a use case for this besides making it difficult to shut down illegal AIs.
Making it difficult to shut down AI’s is very important. There’s a real chance we end up with a regulatory capture cartel that’s enforced because of “safety”.
But there are solid engineering and logistical advantages. Not having to deal with nimby’s, permitting, data center blowback is a big advantage. It’s difficult to spin up new power infrastructure in western countries, and putting up a satellite with direct 24/7 solar power means you can skip the headache of building new power infrastructure. My electricity bill has increased by 50% in the last year and most of that increase is likely because of data centers powering AI. If we can instead directly power that compute in orbit from the sun then it will not increase demand on existing power infrastructure.
Unlimited power and real estate with zero local opposition.
None of those things are true.
How so? Space has no locals, and the sun never sets up there.
In orbit around Earth it does! In LEO it’s like 45 minutes of day and 45 minutes of night IIRC
The entire concept of an illegal AI is something I hope never comes to pass.
AIs are already doing illegal things
AI doing something illegal and AI being illegal are very different things
Well, that's what I meant primarily. An AI that is doing something damaging.
The standard motivation is 24/7 unfiltered sunlight to power the AI with, where you're not in anyone's backyard and don't need to convince a planning commission.
> The standard motivation is 24/7 unfiltered sunlight to power the AI with, where you're not in anyone's backyard and don't need to convince a planning commission.
The orbit that this is in doesn't meet that criteria. While it is in a near polar orbit, it is not in a dusk dawn orbit ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit ). Half of its orbit is in shadow.
As I wrote this, it is above Campo Grande, Brazil. The time there is 10 pm.
https://satellitemap.space/sat/100902
1 A0902U 26227V 26304.16445033 .00002596 00000-0 13395-3 0 9997
2 A0902 97.4408 13.1552 0001768 65.9370 294.2048 15.17216777 4461You do, though. The FAA/AST govern launches. I'm no rocket scientist but building a rocket and launching it is probably much harder than building a small data center.
It’s probably a lower regulatory burden to get the approval of the FAA than it is any number of municipal bodies to get approval for building and powering a new data center. There are a lot of people that need to sign off on things. When you’re talking about space, if you can afford and build it, that list is pretty short.
I’m not convinced that the economics are favorable to space based data centers, but ironically, it still might be a lower hurdle than terrestrial data center approval.
The FAA is federal, and may pre-empt state/local laws (see: CFTC, Kalshi/Polymarket/etc).
It's also pretty well accepted that the FAA is very cozy to SpaceX, and partially because NASA is basically dependent and beholden on SpaceX at the moment.
It’s not though. There’s existing rocket launches that fit within a well established federal regulatory framework. Building data centers has overlapping state and municipal regulations as well as local opposition.
So their weights are just floating up there?
I suppose it’s beyond hard anyone would hijack their satellite but still. Wonder if they put any physical security on it anyway.
A competing team at Google already exfiltrated the weights of the model running on the satellite and uploaded them to huggingface! https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-E4B
Putting AI in space is a silly idea. How do you cool it reliably? How do you handle rad-hardness? How do you even get the gear up there? It's one of the most expensive places to put mass.
Using geothermal power or floating solar arrays in the ocean makes way more sense. It's much easier to access, you have water for a heat sink, and you're far away from anyone or anything that would really care.
More controversially, if geothermal or solar doesn't pan out, you could power it via nuclear microreactors (just what I want floating in my world's ocean) or gas that would otherwise be flared off from a deep sea oil well (CO2 non-withstanding).
Satellite cooling is long figured out, the problem is that it requires a ton of expensive mass.
Radiation hardening is not a huge issue in LEO either. It is an issue, not the issue.
Overall, it's like choosing international flights as your choice of a restaurant. It's...fundamentally...doable...? But nobody knows why you would want that, unless flying GPUs is the point rather than to offer a competitive service using the server sats.
Someone made a good point on a previous comment like this: the main selling point is the public can’t destroy them
The public doesn't need to. If these companies actually try to build datacenters in space they will bankrupt themselves. It's a ridiculously stupid idea.
It is expensive, but the radiators won't necessarily push the state of the art. https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-buil... The current test is to see how big an issue rad-hardness actually is.
Scott Manley has an excellent video breaking down the math on cooling.
It’s totally doable.
The fact that this comment is being downvoted says so much about so many things. And so many people. This community--not just HN, I'm talking about tech at large--has totally lost its way.
Is this the piece of junk that can only run for 15min at a time before it overheats? They probably could have done some more analysis before launching it into space.. Like put the radiator in a vacuum chamber maybe? Or do some thermal modelling? Or did they know it would do this and launch it anyway? Would love to know why.
Could you provide a source for that claim?
Why yes, I sure can!
> The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/technology/google-suncatc...
Did they finally figure out, while possible, it is extremely impractical?
[dead]
Google taking a lesson from the marketing school of Musk? Public spectacle to boost stock price?
> poem confirmed success:
What a load of horseshit. A model running on a ESP32 running off a questionable powerbank supply with dodgy coding and worse storage reliability can do that.
The only thing anyone cares about is whether the (economic)math works on put AI in space.
>The only thing anyone cares about is whether the (economic)math works on put AI in space.
This is a greater fool market. The only thing anyone cares about is whether they think someone else will believe the math will work out.