Four TPUs at Altitude
Google's Project Suncatcher scheduled its first hardware test for October 1 on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare: four Trillium TPUs going to low Earth orbit to test radiation tolerance, thermal cycling, and launch forces. The companion research paper describes the full engineering stack — free-space optical links at 1.6 Tbps, close-formation station-keeping with Hill-Clohessy-Wiltshire equations, and economics that only close if launch costs fall below $200/kg by the mid-2030s.
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