🛰️Google's Suncatcher Satellite Runs Gemma 4 AI From Orbit, Writes Haiku

Your next inference could run 500 km above Earth

Google just got an AI model to write poetry from orbit. Its Suncatcher satellite, launched in October 2026, ran an onboard Gemma 4 model that answered a ground station prompt with a haiku as it passed over Svalbard, Norway. It's a 'Hello World' moment, and yes, it's a bit silly. It's also a serious test bed. Why should you care? Because the economics are the point. Launch costs are currently around $7,000 per kg, and Google's math says that needs to drop to $200/kg before orbital compute matches terrestrial datacenter electricity in the US over the satellite's useful life. Google expects SpaceX could hit that by 2035. If you're planning capacity for inference-heavy workloads, that's a long horizon, but it's no longer science fiction. The numbers so far: the haiku was about 20 tokens, which would cost roughly $0.000012 through the Google Cloud API. The satellite weighs about 500 kg. Testing also covered limericks and telemetry reports on payload status. Radiation work is the sobering part. High-bandwidth memory is the most sensitive component to total ionizing dose, and the observed silent data corruption rate of about one event per 17 rad works out to roughly 1 failure per 3 million inferences. Next year, Google plans to test two interconnected satellites, with a constellation of smaller ones after that.