The New Space Race: Startups Press Ahead on ‘Orbital Infrastructure,’ Test Feasibility of Data Centers
The New Space Race: Startups Press Ahead on ‘Orbital Infrastructure,’ Test Feasibility of Data Centers
Beaming energy to Earth is a big stepping-stone for upstart satellite & rocket companies
Space data centers, once confined to sci-fi novels and ambitious pitch decks, are beginning to get real.
A SpaceX rocket earlier this month carried an experimental Google satellite that will make simple requests to Gemini while researchers test how its four TPUs hold up in space. The same launch carried the Reason-1 satellite from startup Cowboy Space, which is experimenting with beaming solar power back to Earth with a laser.
Cowboy Space, led by Robinhood cofounder Baiju Bhatt and backed by Jan Hammer at Index Ventures, among others, this week unveiled an even bigger swing: its own purpose-built data center rocket that can carry five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs into orbit. The startup also plans to use this rocket to compete with SpaceX in selling launch services to others under the name “Big Iron Express.”
Bhatt told Newcomer that his company’s “north star” is to make space compute cost-competitive with terrestrial compute, and that it’s vertically integrating to the extreme to achieve that end. Another well-funded player is Starcloud, backed by Benchmark and currently valued at $2.3 billion...
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