The launch of a prototype satellite scheduled for next week will be through the company’s Project Suncatcher initiative.
As AI data centers are being built around the world at a growing pace, Google is looking to expand the trend in outer space starting next week.
Plans have been in the works…
The company first unveiled Project Suncatcher in an announcement last November, saying its goal is to launch two prototype satellites by early 2027 “that will test our hardware in orbit, laying the groundwork for a future era of massively-scaled computation in space.”
For its upcoming Oct. 1 launch into space, Google’s prototype satellite will be loaded onto a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, The New York Times reported. The company told the newspaper it is not sending a full data center but rather an experimental version of one.
In its blog post ahead of the scheduled launch, Google detailed the behind-the-scenes work for Project Suncatcher, such as testing whether its AI hardware can survive in space.
The plans are long term..
In describing his company’s expectations for the prototype satellite, James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president, told the Times, adding, “We don’t expect, to be perfectly frank, that we’ll have anything usefully operational in the next few years.” He compared that with Google’s earlier work on driverless cars, which took the company 15 years to research before anything came to fruition.