Overview
- Google will send a refrigerator‑sized prototype called MVP into dawn‑dusk low Earth orbit on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare, with a launch scheduled for October 1, 2026.
- The satellite carries four Trillium tensor processing units, enough compute roughly comparable to a single server, integrated into a Planet Labs bus and powered by about one kilowatt of solar output.
- During short test windows the TPUs will run Google’s Gemini models for roughly 15 minutes at a time while sensors record performance under real launch vibration, space radiation and thermal conditions.
- Google says ground proton‑beam radiation tests and vibration checks showed the TPUs and sensitive high‑bandwidth memory survived doses and shocks equivalent to mission exposure, but the flight is explicitly a failure‑mode experiment not a commercial service.
- If the tests succeed, Google plans two linked satellites in 2027 to try high‑bandwidth laser links and still projects that orbitally based AI would reach rough economic parity with terrestrial centers only by the mid‑2030s if launch costs fall below about $200 per kilogram.