Orbital compute moved from slideware toward hardware on the same Falcon 9. ThePrint reported that Hyderabad startup TakeMe2Space launched MOI-1A on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare from Vandenberg, about 10 months after its first satellite was lost on a failed ISRO PSLV flight in January. Google separately confirmed contact with its Project Suncatcher prototype on the same mission, a Planet-built bus carrying Trillium TPUs to test AI chips in sunlight, radiation, and vacuum heat.

MOI-1A is a 14-kilogram Earth-observation craft with 117 TOPS of onboard computing, 2 TB of storage, and a nine-band multispectral imager. ThePrint says it already has 23 customers and is the first of five planned satellites toward what the company calls an orbital data center — collect imagery and process it in space so less raw data must hit the ground. Agriculture monitoring, mining, and supply-chain intelligence are the named uses.

For science and climate users, on-orbit processing could eventually compress Earth-observation streams before downlink — a niche that matters when constellations grow faster than ground-station hours. That promise remains aspirational until commissioning proves thermal control, radiation tolerance, and sustained compute. Google’s peer team will gather weeks of in-orbit data on how TPUs handle launch stress and space extremes; Morning Overview put four chips on the small bus.

Overnight avoids inventing benchmark FLOPS or customer contracts. Watch for TakeMe2Space’s first checkout notes, any independent NORAD catalog tracking, and Google’s early radiation and thermal telemetry. Failure modes include cooling, power, and single-event upsets that ground data centers never see.

What we know:
MOI-1A and Suncatcher launched via Transporter-18 as orbital-computing demonstrators and are entering commissioning.

What we don’t:
Whether either craft will sustain advertised compute performance through its first thermal and radiation cycles.