Aspiring competitor to SpaceX introduces themselves

Back in 2024 a company called Aetherflux was founded with the intent to put up huge solar power arrays and beam the power back down to Earth. That goal apparently didn't last very long because the California-based company with everything named as if it's Texan, called Cowboy Space, has made it known their intent now is to launch a fleet of orbital data centers, which means to compete directly with SpaceX. 

The California-based company, which is run by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, intends to operate a constellation of 20,000 AI data centers in low Earth orbit (LEO). It will build those satellites in house and launch them on a homegrown rocket — a vehicle Cowboy Space unveiled here on Monday night (Oct. 26), at an event it called "Big Sky Rising."

"It's a fundamentally novel approach to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion," Bhatt said during the event. "The idea is that you have a two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite." 

The rocket is named Big Iron, as is the data-center satellite, which I suppose is another way of saying it's a two stage rocket where the upper stage stays in orbit to become that satellite. Founder Baiju Bhatt is an Indian billionaire and absolutely can't be accused of not having visions for developing businesses. 

The stainless-steel rocket will be 282 feet (86 meters) tall and 15.4 feet (4.7 m) wide. It will be powered by Cowboy Space's Clydesdale engines — nine in the first stage and one in the upper stage, the same configuration employed by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. And, like the Raptor engines that power another SpaceX launcher, the giant Starship, Clydesdale will burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, a combo known as methalox.

The first stage of the Big Iron rocket will be reusable and while they don't have a launch site named yet, they plan to be close enough to an ocean to recover the booster on a barge ship, like the vast majority of Falcon 9 launches. The upper stage, as mentioned, will stay in orbit as a Big Iron satellite and if there are going be tens of thousands of these on orbit, I'm sure they'll have something like a serial number or other Data Center identifier. The spacecraft will tip the scales here on Earth at about 33,000 pounds, and after unfurling its solar panels will be about 433 feet long.

During launch, the Big Iron will have a nose cone to protect the rest of the upper stage from the first minute or two of ascent, but it will not be dropped, as the Falcon 9 drops its payload fairings for recovery and reuse. Instead, the fairing will turn into a radiator, to dump the prodigious heat generated by Big Iron's GPUs (general processing units) into space. 

Don't forget there will be 20,000 of these GPU satellites up there. That's a lot of GPUs: each satellite will carry five racks of them and will provide about 1 megawatt of compute payload. 

Cowboy Space plans to operate about 20,000 Big Iron satellites in LEO, a constellation it calls Stampede. Each rocket will carry just one of these satellites to orbit, so it will take 20,000 launches to build Stampede — and, likely, several thousand more every year to maintain it at that number.

Cowboy Space therefore intends to launch very often — multiple times per day, from launch complexes it calls Trailheads. The company has not yet announced where these complexes will be, but each one will likely feature four active launch mounts, Bhatt said on Monday night.

So when does all this go live? In their minds, they're going now, but if you're wondering about when we'll see launches starting, I've got to think mid- to late-'29. At best. 

Artist's illustration of Cowboy Space's newly announced Big Iron rocket lifting off. Note one on the right 30 seconds or so into its flight curving toward the upper right corner and one on a pad near the left edge that seems to be releasing some cold gas, so possibly in some part of a countdown. (Image credit: Cowboy Space)

An interesting note to end this with is that Cowboy Space is operating one piece of space hardware at the moment. It's a satellite called Reason-1, launched on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission back on Oct. 1.

"Its job is to prove out power beaming: using a high-power laser to transfer energy from low Earth orbit to a receiver on the ground," Cowboy Space said via X on Sept. 28. "If you want to build data centers in space, you have to master the optical systems between orbit and Earth. This is where that journey begins."