Google’s Oct. 1, 2026 launch of the Project Suncatcher MVP satellite aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 marks the clearest recent catalyst for trader sentiment. The refrigerator-sized craft carries four Trillium TPUs—the equivalent of one terrestrial server—powered by roughly 1 kW of solar arrays and is now operating in low Earth orbit to test vibration tolerance, radiation effects, and a novel radiative cooling system required because convection fans fail in vacuum. The satellite will run short Gemini inference bursts for up to a year. Parallel efforts include Starcloud’s prior orbital LLM training on an Nvidia H100 and its planned 2028 lunar-orbit demo, plus FCC filings by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and others for thousands of future compute satellites. These hardware milestones and competitive filings have shifted focus from speculation to engineering timelines, though thermal limits, inter-satellite laser links, and launch economics remain key variables ahead of Google’s two additional test satellites scheduled for 2027.