Google’s Suncatcher prototype, a satellite carrying four Tensor Processing Units, is online and talking to the ground, TechCrunch reports. It launched earlier this month on a SpaceX Falcon 9 alongside more than 100 other spacecraft.
After about three weeks of commissioning, engineers sent the first prompt this week. They asked Gemma 4, the model loaded on board, for a haiku about being in space, and got three lines ending “Starlight feeds my core.”
The poem is the easy part. The satellite generates up to 1 kilowatt of electricity, so it can turn on only one TPU, and only for about 20 minutes at a time. A Google spokesperson says it is operating nominally.
The test campaign now covers thermal stress and radiation. Radiation can flip bits in memory and corrupt data without tripping normal monitoring. Google’s ground tests suggested the effect would be minimal for inference and more of a problem for training, and this is the first real check.
Two more satellites with more advanced chips are planned for 2027, with higher power generation and optical links between spacecraft. Suncatcher is unusual in planning for close-flying satellites to share one workload.
The economics sit with Starship, which is still in development. A peer-reviewed analysis by Suncatcher researchers estimated SpaceX would need to fly it 1,800 times to reach the learning-driven cost falls its earlier vehicles saw.
Twenty minutes of one chip shows the satellite works. It says nothing yet about whether the chips survive, which is the question 2027 depends on.
