Google’s Suncatcher satellite writes AI haiku in orbit

Google's experimental AI satellite has answered its first prompt from space. The company said on Friday, October 30, that an onboard Gemma 4 model running on a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) wrote a haiku during a ground-station pass over Svalbard, Norway. Google called it a "Hello World" moment and described it as "the first-ever AI response from a data center class TPU in orbit".blog.google

The test is an early proof point for Project Suncatcher, a long-range research effort by Alphabet ↘ 1.45% to find out whether solar-powered machine learning infrastructure could one day operate in orbit. The prototype has shown that the chips run in space. It has not yet shown how they hold up under radiation and heat over time.

A poem from low Earth orbit

Engineers uplinked a request for a haiku about being in space, and the satellite sent back: "Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core". Google said it then tried space-themed limericks and telemetry prompts that reported the status of the payload systems. A spokesperson told TechCrunch the satellite was operating nominally.techcrunch.com+2

The prompt came after about three weeks of commissioning, during which the team powered up the host and TPU trays and ran early machine learning tests. The spacecraft carries four TPUs and generates up to 1 kilowatt of electricity. Because of power limits, it can run only one chip at a time, for about 20 minutes, which makes communication with the ground harder.techcrunch.com

Built with Planet, launched by SpaceX

The satellite was built with Planet Labs ↘ 5.87% and launched on October 1 aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Google published the research behind the mission in the peer-reviewed journal Joule.investors.planet.com+1

Radiation and heat come next

Next, Google will test how the TPUs perform under thermal stress and radiation exposure in orbit. Google has already tested its chips in particle accelerators on Earth. Those tests suggested radiation-induced "bit flips" would be a smaller problem for inference than for training, and the team will now check that in real conditions. Cooling in a vacuum is still an open problem.startupfortune.com+2

If the chips perform well, Google plans to launch two interconnected satellites in 2027. They are expected to generate more power and demonstrate optical links between spacecraft. Google's longer-term plans depend on cheap launches. Suncatcher researchers estimated that SpaceX would need to fly Starship 1,800 times to reach the cost reductions it saw with earlier rockets. For now, Google says its chips "have officially earned their space wings".blog.google+1