Travis Beals

New Capabilities

Overseeing the prototype's thermal and radiation testing in orbit

On October 1, a Google prototype satellite rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 into low Earth orbit carrying four Tensor Processing Units, the chips Google builds for machine learning. After about three weeks of checking out its subsystems, the spacecraft took a prompt from the ground on October 30: a chip running Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 model wrote a haiku about being in space, downlinked as the satellite passed over Svalbard, Norway.

Updated Nov 1