Research Feed

SpaceX is finally public, and the IPO came in hot: an $85.7 billion raise that reshapes the near-term model, plus an all-stock Cursor deal that hands SpaceX AI the orchestration layer it was missing. But the heart of this episode is a deep dive into the hardest engineering problem facing orbital data centers, which is heat. Mach 33 is joined by McKenzie Sandberg, an original Starlink thermal engineer now at Advanced Cooling Technologies, to read SpaceX's newly revealed AI satellite from the radiators in. We get into why the radiator unfolds like origami, why it probably runs water instead of ammonia, how hot you can push a GPU before it dies, and why the whole spacecraft behaves like a floppy wet noodle. The verdict: the thermal challenges are real, but they are tractable.

SpaceX disclosed the first specification for AI1, its first orbital compute satellite, in June 2026. We reconstruct the satellite subsystem by subsystem from the published figures and the Mach33 Orbital Data Center model, which had already placed both the first unit and the optimized unit inside the range SpaceX has now confirmed. The reconstruction shows a satellite optimized for a single 150 kW figure. Solar, compute, and radiator are all designed to handle a 150 kW load.