Google receives first Gemma 4 inference response from orbital TPU on Project Suncatcher

Built in partnership with Planet, Google’s Project Suncatcher prototype satellite launched into low-Earth orbit on 1 October 2026 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission alongside a peer-reviewed design study in Joule. Over the following four weeks, Google Research engineers worked through an orbital commissioning checklist that powered up the satellite host bus and custom TPU trays and verified baseline machine learning execution in vacuum.

Orbital inference test

On 30 October 2026, Senior Director Travis Beals and CEO Sundar Pichai reported the mission’s first end-to-end language model response from space. During a ground-station pass, engineers uplinked a prompt asking the onboard Gemma 4 open model to write a haiku from the perspective of an orbiting TPU watching Earth spin below. As the spacecraft crossed over Svalbard, Norway, it downlinked the completed verse: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.”

Engineers followed the initial pass with space-themed limericks and structured telemetry prompts that queried the technical health of the payload systems. Google Research will continue evaluating how data-centre-class TPUs behave under sustained thermal cycling and orbital radiation exposure ahead of its next hardware milestone: launching twin interconnected satellites in 2027 to test high-bandwidth optical links in space. Google has not published orbital power figures, radiation error rates, or commercial deployment dates.