Google has unveiled its “moonshot” “Project Suncatcher,” but the timeline is one of cautious, long-term development, not a sprint. The company is planning to launch just “two prototype satellites by early 2027,” with economic viability not projected until “the middle of the 2030s.”
This deliberate, decade-plus timeline reflects the immense difficulty of the “significant engineering challenges” Google itself has acknowledged. This is not a project that can be rushed.
The 2027 prototypes are just the “first milestone.” Their job will be to test the riskiest new technologies: thermal management in a vacuum, the reliability of TPUs in a radiation-filled environment, and the feasibility of high-bandwidth optical links to the ground.
Only after these core problems are solved can Google move on to the next phase: building the “compact constellations of about 80” satellites. This phase will test the economics of the system, which is where the falling cost of rocket launches becomes critical.
This long-term view places Google in a different position from competitors like Starcloud, which is launching chips this month. Google appears to be focused on building a fully scalable, long-term system, and it is giving itself more than a decade to get it right.