Specialized chips Google designed to run artificial intelligence workloads will be catapulted into low Earth orbit on Thursday afternoon atop a Falcon 9 rocket from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base, with hopes of making data centers in space a reality amid growing backlash on the ground that has sent many terrestrial projects into a tailspin.
Up next, Falcon 9 will launch 130 payloads to orbit from California aboard the Transporter-18 mission. Liftoff is targeted for 11:22 a.m. PT → https://t.co/ITRKTeX0fu pic.twitter.com/A8dZsF7H4b
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 1, 2026
The Falcon 9 launch, scheduled for 2:18 pm Eastern time as part of the Transporter-18 mission, will carry a solar-powered satellite prototype equipped with Google's tensor processing units. This is the first orbital test for Project Suncatcher, Alphabet's effort to deploy data center satellites in low Earth orbit, where power is abundant and regulation is nonexistent.
In a pre-launch announcement, Alphabet said Project Suncatcher is a means of "exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine lea
