Yet another Hacker News

Our Project Suncatcher prototype satellite is in orbit

11 points pantalaimon 7 hours ago 8 comments

Kevin_Flynn 7 hours ago | parent

Smells like a cover story for military AI module validation testing.

The AI industry spends crazy money to reduce latency and increase density. The act of placing resources in space, to be used by people on earth, only increases latency, and reduces density. The performance metrics are ops/power/space/$, not G ratings, unless its being validated for flight.

vineyardmike 10 minutes ago | parent

Maybe. But it’s also Google, a company famous for just spending money on random crap. Data centers are politically toxic right now, and Elon Musk’s bloviating made it trendy to discuss AI in space. Maybe they think that following this trend with a relatively simple launch will raise the stock.

I think it’s somewhat impressive they got it into orbit quickly since surely a year ago this wasn’t an earnest idea, and I think it’ll be interesting to see the affects of space on high end chips and connectivity fabric.

But also I agree that this just doesn’t make sense from a performance standpoint.

Robotbeat 10 minutes ago | parent

Terrestrial data centers are having a hard time connecting to power. What’s the good of a $40/Watt compute asset you can’t turn on? Spending $10 or even $20/Watt extra to get power by sending inference load to orbit starts to sound like a bargain, and that’s doable with today’s launch vehicles. With high reuse, that number drops to below $1/Watt for 24/7 power, which makes it cheaper than any terrestrial energy source. And the vast majority of compute load is inference. Part of the training process benefits from a large, coherent (ie low latency) data center, but that’s a minority of the load nowadays.

Also: low Earth orbit is already pretty low latency. A lot of people’s intuitions about space latency are from when satellite internet was based out of distant geosynchronous satellites, but even that is probably just fine for most inference workloads.

dang 17 minutes ago | parent

Recent and related:

Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49837350 - Sept 2026 (96 comments)

Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830606 - Sept 2026 (551 comments)

dyauspitr 13 minutes ago | parent

When did they do this? I didn’t hear of any SpaceX launches besides the falcon launch yesterday for a government spy satellite. I wonder if this one was also bundled in.

grendelt 4 minutes ago | parent

If US folks are watching a rocket launch and they're wearing light jackets, it's Vandenberg (which doesn't publish all their scheduled rocket launches.)

dgellow 8 minutes ago | parent

Cool, we will finally have actual data to see if that’s possible or not. My understanding is that doing compute in space for ML is pretty absurd, but the discussion will be way more interesting with real numbers.

I still think it’s mostly a way to put pressure on politicians, « you either give us tax cut, fast tracked permits, and let us do what we want with the land or we go to space and you get no benefits »