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Cowboy Space, a California-based space startup led by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, has unveiled plans to build a constellation of 20,000 artificial intelligence (AI) data centres in low Earth orbit, supported by a giant rocket designed to turn its upper stage into a satellite.
The company unveiled its stainless-steel Big Iron rocket at an event called “Big Sky Rising” on Monday night, October 26, outlining an ambitious plan to manufacture its own satellites and launch vehicles to support computing infrastructure in space.
“It’s a fundamentally novel approach to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion,” Bhatt said at the event, explaining that the rocket’s upper stage would transform into a satellite after reaching orbit.
The 282-foot (86-metre) rocket will be powered by the company’s Clydesdale engines, with nine engines in the reusable first stage and one in the upper stage. The engines will burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, a combination known as methalox, also used by SpaceX’s Starship.
The first stage is designed to return to Earth and land on a ship at sea, while the upper stage will remain in orbit as an operational data centre.
Each Big Iron satellite will weigh around 15,000 kilogrammes and extend to approximately 132 metres after deploying its solar panels. It will carry five racks of graphics processing units (GPUs), providing about one megawatt of computing capacity.
The satellite’s payload fairing, which protects it during launch, will be converted into a radiator to dissipate the heat generated by its computing hardware.
Cowboy Space plans to deploy the satellites as part of a constellation called Stampede. With each rocket carrying only one satellite, completing the planned network would require 20,000 launches, followed by thousands more launches over time to maintain the constellation.
The company aims to conduct multiple launches per day from facilities it calls Trailheads. Each facility could feature four active launch mounts, although the locations have not yet been announced.
Cowboy Space also plans to offer commercial launch services under the name Big Iron Express, carrying customers’ payloads in addition to deploying its own data-centre satellites.
The company is targeting December 2028 for Big Iron’s maiden flight, although Bhatt acknowledged that the schedule would depend on successful development and testing of the rocket and its engines.
Founded in 2024 as Aetherflux, a power-beaming company, Cowboy Space is currently operating a satellite called Reason-1. Launched aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission on October 1, the satellite is designed to demonstrate the transfer of energy from low Earth orbit to a ground-based receiver using a high-power laser.
The company sees optical power transmission as a key technology for its broader ambitions in space-based computing.
Cowboy Space’s plans come amid growing interest in orbital AI infrastructure, as technology companies explore whether space-based data centres could provide an alternative to some terrestrial computing facilities. However, the scale of the proposed constellation would require an exceptionally high launch rate, alongside solutions to the technical and operational challenges of maintaining thousands of computing satellites in orbit.
