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PALO ALTO, Calif. — Cowboy Space just showed us how it plans to become a major player in the final frontier.
The California-based company, led by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, intends to operate a constellation of 20,000 people. AI Data Centers In low earth orbit (LION). It will build these satellites in-house and launch them on a local rocket – a vehicle Cowboy Space unveiled here Monday evening (October 26), during an event titled “Big Sky Rising.”
“This is, in our view, a fundamentally new approach to rocketry in the modern era,” Bhatt said at the event. “The idea is that you have a two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself turns into a satellite.”
That rocket is called Big Iron, Bhatt told us Monday evening. The same goes for the data center satellite, as both are considered part of the same system.
The stainless steel rocket will measure 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 used by SpaceX’s workhorse. Falcon 9 rocket. And, like the Raptor engines that power another EspaceX launcher, the giant SpacecraftClydesdale will burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, a combo known as methalox.
The first stage of Big Iron will be reusable; an animation shown by Bhatt during “Big Sky Rising” showed the booster descending for a landing on a ship at sea, as Falcon 9 first stages often do these days.
The upper stage, meanwhile, will remain in orbit as a Big Iron satellite. The spaceship will tip the scales here Earth weighing approximately 33,000 pounds (15,000 kilograms) and, after deploying its solar panels, it will be approximately 433 feet (132 m) long.
The payload shroud that protected the satellite during launch will transform into a radiator, releasing the prodigious heat generated by Big Iron’s GPUs (general processing units) into space. And there will be a lot of GPUs: Each satellite will carry five racks of them, Bhatt said, which will provide about 1 megawatt of computing payload.
Big Iron will therefore be much larger than an “imperial-class satellite” – the term Bhatt uses to designate the SpaceX project. Star Spirit AI data center spacecraft, each of which will have a solar span of 246 feet (75 m) and will have approximately 250 kW of computing 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 into orbit, so it will take 20,000 launches to build Stampede – and probably several thousand more each year to keep it at that number.
Cowboy Space therefore intends to launch very often, several times a day, from launch complexes it calls Trailheads. The company has not yet announced where these complexes will be located, but each will likely have four active launch pads, Bhatt said Monday evening.
And not all of these launches will be used at the Stampede. Towards the end of “Big Sky Rising”, Bhatt announced that Big Iron would also launch payloads for customers, a service Cowboy Space calls Big Iron Express.
The first flights of this new rocket will take place in a few years. Cowboy Space, founded in 2024 as a power transmission company Ether Flow – is still building and testing its Clydesdale engine and says it plans to launch Big Iron for the first time in December 2028.
“Now, a lot of things have to go right for that to happen; it’s not a guarantee,” Bhatt said. “I think it’s ambitious. But if it wasn’t ambitious, I wouldn’t be an entrepreneur.”
By the way, Cowboy Space currently operates just one piece of space hardware: a satellite called Reason-1, which was launched on the SpaceX satellite. Carrier-18 carpool mission on October 1st.
“His job is to prove the effectiveness of the power beam: using a high-power laser to transfer energy from low Earth orbit to a receiver on the ground,” Cowboy Space said. via X on September 28. “If you want to build data centers in space, you need to master the optical systems between orbit and Earth. That’s where this journey begins.”
Gn tech
