Google’s “Project Suncatcher” is a bold vision, but the company’s own “cautionary note” lays out three massive hurdles that must be overcome. These “significant engineering challenges” are thermal management, ground communications, and reliability.
First, “thermal management” is the problem of cooling high-performance AI chips in the vacuum of space. Without air or water, Google must invent a new, reliable way to radiate away the intense heat generated by its TPUs to stop them from melting.
Second, “high-bandwidth ground communications” is the challenge of getting data back to Earth. The plan calls for optical links, but these lasers must work perfectly from a constellation of satellites moving at thousands of miles per hour, 400 miles up, targeting ground stations through a distorting atmosphere.
Finally, “on-orbit system reliability” is perhaps the biggest challenge. These datacenters must operate for years without maintenance or repair. Any single component failure could brick a multi-million-dollar satellite, a problem that doesn’t exist in a terrestrial datacentre.
Google’s 2027 prototype launch is not about demonstrating a working system, but about gathering the first data on how to solve these three fundamental problems. The entire “moonshot” depends on finding solutions to all three.
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