Fifteen Minutes at a Time

Part of Big Tech's War on Users So someone's actually going to try it. On Thursday, October 1, Google launches the first hardware test for Project Suncatcher, its orbital data center moonshot. Back in May, in Evil vs Evil, I spent a good chunk of a trial post explaining why the orbital data center pitch doesn't survive contact with physics. Launch mass. Radiation-hardened everything. And cooling, which is the one that doesn't care how much money you have. Now someone's actually going to find out. And the numbers Google has already shared about its own test satellite are something. I read them twice. Meet MVP The satellite is called MVP. It's about the size of a refrigerator, built with Planet Labs, and it's riding up on a SpaceX Falcon 9 as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare out of Vandenberg. On board: four of Google's TPUs. Four TPUs is, per the reporting, roughly the compute of one data center server. One. And that one server can run for about fifteen minutes before it has to…