Cowboy Space unveils 'Big Iron' rocket to launch 20,000 AI data centers

Artist's illustration of Cowboy Space's newly announced Big Iron rocket lifting off. (Image credit: Cowboy Space)

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Cowboy Space just showed us how it plans to become a big player in the final frontier.

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."

Big Iron's first stage will be reusable. The upper stage will serve as a data-center satellite after reaching orbit. (Image credit: Cowboy Space)

That rocket is called Big Iron, Bhatt told us on Monday night. And so is the data-center satellite, as both are considered to be part of the same system.

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.

Big Iron's first stage will be reusable; an animation Bhatt showed during "Big Sky Rising" showed the booster coming down for a landing on a ship at sea, as Falcon 9 first stages often do these days.

The upper stage, meanwhile, will stay in orbit as a Big Iron satellite. The spacecraft will tip the scales here on Earth at about 33,000 pounds (15,000 kilograms), and, after unfurling its solar panels, it will be about 433 feet (132 m) long.

The payload fairing that protected the satellite during launch will morph into a radiator, which will dump into space the prodigious heat generated by Big Iron's GPUs (general processing units). 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 compute payload.

Big Iron will therefore be much larger than an "imperial-class satellite" — Bhatt's term for SpaceX's planned Starmind AI data center spacecraft, each of which will have a solar wingspan of 246 feet (75 m) and boast about 250 kW of compute payload.

Illustration of Cowboy Space's Big Iron AI data center satellite. (Image credit: Cowboy Space)

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.

And not all of these launches will serve Stampede. Toward the end of "Big Sky Rising," Bhatt announced that Big Iron will also launch payloads for customers, a service that Cowboy Space calls Big Iron Express.

The first flights of this new rocket are a few years away. Cowboy Space — which was founded in 2024 as the power-beaming company Aetherflux — is still building and testing its Clydesdale engine and says it aims 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."

Cowboy Space is operating one piece of space hardware at the moment, by the way — a satellite called Reason-1, which launched on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission 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."

Michael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.