First response from the Project Suncatcher prototype satellite

Posted by praccu 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by loufe 9 hours 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.

Comment by smallerize 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by zdc1 7 hours ago

Too many details might be bad for the stockmarket and its AI hype train...

Comment by aftbit 9 hours ago

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).

Comment by numpad0 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by danishanish 5 hours ago

I think the cooling mass is so expensive and fragile that it’s basically an unsolved problem.

Comment by numpad0 2 hours ago

No, I mean, you can fly daily from NYC to London and back every single night for 5 years straight just to use the business class seats to sleep and to have inflight meals as your dinners and your breakfasts. That would be a 100% feasible solved problem from technical standpoint. But why would you do that.

They can probably build like, a gigantic satellite that fits in an expendable Starship that has like just couples of RTX5090 32GB backed by a Tesla battery pack and a gigantic multi panel actively refrigerating radiator system. Or use bunch of such Starships to assemble a whole rack worth of GPUs on orbit that costs billions total and minimum half a year to build out. Satellites and radiators are solved good enough for that.

Or you can put just the computer part on a desk indoor on Earth and plug it into the wall and have it cooled with fans. Or have a guy roll up an air cooled rack full of GPUs next to it. Why involve the rockets and satellites and all. What's the point. That's what everyone is puzzled with.

Comment by orf 8 hours ago

Someone made a good point on a previous comment like this: the main selling point is the public can’t destroy them

Comment by 27183 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by relaxing 7 hours ago

That sounds like a fun challenge! DIY ASAT when?

Comment by smallerize 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by Dig1t 7 hours ago

Scott Manley has an excellent video breaking down the math on cooling.

It’s totally doable.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FlQYU3m1e80

Comment by 27183 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by 6thbit 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by gcr 8 hours ago

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

Comment by smallerize 9 hours ago

I still can't think of a use case for this besides making it difficult to shut down illegal AIs.

Comment by UltraSane 8 hours ago

Unlimited power and real estate with zero local opposition.

Comment by relaxing 7 hours ago

None of those things are true.

Comment by BobbyJo 7 hours ago

How so? Space has no locals, and the sun never sets up there.

Comment by openasocket 6 hours ago

In orbit around Earth it does! In LEO it’s like 45 minutes of day and 45 minutes of night IIRC

Comment by dnautics 6 hours ago

There are Sun Synchronous orbits that will be used eventually

Comment by JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago

Or just go further out. A box doing training breaks even faster even with the lift penalty.

Comment by UltraSane 6 hours ago

They are if you can get launch costs cheap enough. I hope that is possible but I don't think that it is.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by BurningFrog 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by shagie 7 hours ago

> 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  4461

Comment by randomblock1 9 hours ago

You 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.

Comment by vlovich123 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by mbreese 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by dannyw 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by BurningFrog 3 hours ago

You don't have to build your own rocket anymore. SpaceX and others sell launches at fixed prices.

Comment by ls612 9 hours ago

The entire concept of an illegal AI is something I hope never comes to pass.

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by AtlasBarfed 9 hours ago

AIs are already doing illegal things

Comment by ls612 9 hours ago

AI doing something illegal and AI being illegal are very different things

Comment by smallerize 8 hours ago

Well, that's what I meant primarily. An AI that is doing something damaging.

Comment by CamperBob2 7 hours ago

No, people using AI are doing illegal things with it.

Comment by Dig1t 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by Aboutplants 8 hours ago

Did they finally figure out, while possible, it is extremely impractical?

Comment by aaron695 9 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by avaer 9 hours ago

Google taking a lesson from the marketing school of Musk? Public spectacle to boost stock price?

Comment by 27183 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by skybrian 7 hours ago

Could you provide a source for that claim?

Comment by 27183 7 hours ago

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...

Comment by skybrian 5 hours ago

Thanks!

Comment by s1artibartfast 3 hours ago

The point is not to run longer than 15 min. They knew this before even launching it.

Part of development is prototyping and testing. This is part of a process to learn and inform the design of later versions.

We would have very little science or technology if we did not do such tests.

Comment by Havoc 9 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by GolfPopper 8 hours ago

>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.

Comment by 9 hours ago