Google’s Project Suncatcher prepares first orbital test of TPU chips

Google is preparing the first orbital test of Project Suncatcher. A prototype satellite, developed with Planet, will fly on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission to find out whether its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) can work in space.

Announced last year, Suncatcher is a long-term research moonshot asking whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure. Travis Beals, senior director for Paradigms of Intelligence at Google, described the plans in a blog post on 24 September.

Why orbit is attractive

In low Earth orbit, satellites see near-constant sunlight and can generate up to eight times more solar power than comparable hardware on Earth. Google suggests that linking several satellite constellations could eventually let them take on much larger AI workloads in orbit.

Surviving launch and radiation

A rocket ride to orbit lasts about ten minutes and exposes the spacecraft to intense vibration and sustained acceleration of up to 10 times the force of gravity; individual parts such as TPU chips can face 50 to 100 g. The team shook the satellite along all three axes to mimic launch frequencies and reported that the hardware held up.

Outside the atmosphere, solar events and cosmic rays can damage electronics. Engineers tested the chips in a proton beam facility at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory at UC Davis while AI workloads ran, watching for errors such as bit flips. Initial results show the Trillium TPUs survive a radiation dose greater than a five-year space mission would deliver.

Cooling in a vacuum

TPUs concentrate a lot of heat in a small area, and a vacuum has no airflow to carry it away; radiators are the only route. Google is testing a combination of heat pipes and radiators, first in a thermal vacuum chamber that simulates the temperature and vacuum of space.

Laser links between satellites

Future satellites are expected to carry dozens of TPU chips and fly in clusters, communicating by laser. Existing space systems are built for low bandwidth over long distances, while Google needs very high bandwidth over extremely short ranges, a task it compares to hitting a coin-sized target from miles away while both points move. Two satellites will test the link in 2027.

Google says the first launch should show what works and where the weak points are.