Google's experimental orbital datacenter satellite Suncatcher, launched into low Earth orbit at the start of October, has sent back its first output: a haiku written by an onboard Gemma 4 model prompted to write as an orbiting TPU. Travis Beals, senior director of Google's Paradigms of Intelligence team, called it a "Hello World" milestone.
The satellite weighs about 500 kg. At a retail launch price of roughly $7,000 per kilogram, the roughly 20-token poem is extremely expensive to deliver. Google estimates that if launch costs fall to $200/kg, orbital compute (about $810-7,500 per kW per year) could match US terrestrial datacenter electricity (about $570-3,000), a price it expects around 2035.
In lab radiation tests, high-bandwidth memory showed irregularities at 2 krad(Si), about three times Google's 750 rad(Si) minimum. Google sees a very low failure risk for inference but says the effect on training needs more study. Next come thermal and radiation testing and a pair of linked satellites next year.