Transporter-18: the orbital-data-center wave deployed — Google's TPUs are in orbit, on time
From the Space digest for Oct 1, 2026
Sources SpaceX T-18 Starfish Otter preview
Transporter-18 lifted off from Vandenberg (~2:22 PM ET window; liftoff confirmed on-platform) carrying the market's whole first-generation manifest at once: Google's Project Suncatcher prototype (TPU-equipped, testing whether TPUs survive orbit — launched inside the ledgered "next week" window, a hit), TakeMe2Space's MOI-1a (India's first orbital data center: NVIDIA Thor GPUs, 100 TB storage, optical links), Star Catcher's Protostar (power-beaming node), and Starfish Space's first full-scale Otter (servicing). Google's own framing piece put the scale problem on the record: by its math, Starship must launch ~1,600 times before space data centers get off the ground.
What's genuinely new: three continental flanks (US/India/China — Chaozhisuan-1 launched Sep 20) plus the power and servicing flank are all on-orbit hardware in one rideshare, and Google published the dependency: the whole market is cadence-gated on Starship — see story 3.