Cowboy Space Unveils Big Iron Rocket With Upper Stage That Becomes an Orbital Data Center
Cowboy Space revealed Big Iron on Monday evening, a launch vehicle whose upper stage is designed to remain in orbit as a megawatt-class data center. The company is also opening the vehicle to outside customers through a program called Big Iron Express, offering payloads access to up to a megawatt of power.
The company's goal is to put large amounts of power in orbit to run AI data centers. COO and Chief Legal Officer Joseph Yaffe said building its own vehicle is the most efficient way to achieve that. Yaffe noted that launch capacity is currently at a premium, if available at all, though he acknowledged that many alternatives, including Big Iron, have yet to fly, and that government customers want to see a completed rocket.
Big Iron is an 86 m stainless-steel vehicle sized to be transportable by road. Each vehicle is designed to carry more than 15,000 kg to sun-synchronous orbit. Nine liquid-oxygen and methane "Clydesdale" engines will power the first stage, each providing 300,000 lbs of thrust. Cowboy tested part of the Clydesdale at NASA's Stennis Space Center last week, with a roughly 30-person team building and testing the combustion chamber in 90 days. Yaffe said the company is almost a year ahead of schedule.
Rather than being discarded, the upper stage joins Cowboy's constellation. Once deployed in dawn-dusk orbit, each satellite will measure 132 m by 73 m and carry five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs. Many of Big Iron's parts take on a second job in orbit. The rocket's skin becomes the data center's radiator, ammonia propellant works as coolant, and nitrogen that pressurizes the second stage also deploys the solar wings. Yaffe said that building a small satellite with GPUs would require separate radiators, meaning operators pay for the same metal twice to lift it into space.
Cowboy got its first taste of orbit with Reason-1, a laser power beaming demonstration satellite that launched Oct. 1 aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18. Yaffe said the first beaming attempt will likely happen in the next few weeks, and testing so far has turned up zero red flags. Reason-2, slated for launch in 2027, will run GPUs in orbit for commercial and government customers, including a NOAA effort to process weather data in space.
The design approach aims to make every kilogram sent to orbit count by giving components dual functions, reducing cost and weight. Cowboy's broader plan is to scale Stampede, a planned constellation of up to 20,000 satellites, pending FCC approval. Yaffe emphasized that the company still has a lot of executing to do.
Cowboy is targeting Big Iron's first flight in 2028. The first beaming attempt from Reason-1 is expected in the next few weeks, Reason-2 is slated for launch in 2027, and the Stampede constellation remains pending FCC approval.