Cowboy Space Unveils Purpose-Built Orbital Data Center Rocket, Plans 'Big Iron Express' Launch Service to Challenge SpaceX

US startup Cowboy Space this week unveiled plans for its own purpose-built data center rocket, designed to carry five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs into orbit. This move marks a shift from experimental satellite payloads to dedicated hardware for space-based computing. Led by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt and backed by investors including Index Ventures, the company aims to address the growing demand for AI compute capacity.

Beyond deploying its own infrastructure, Cowboy Space plans to use the rocket to offer commercial launch services under the name “Big Iron Express,” directly competing with SpaceX. In an interview with Newcomer, Bhatt stated that the company’s “north star” is to make space compute cost-competitive with terrestrial compute, achieving this through extreme vertical integration.

The announcement follows recent developments in orbital AI, such as Google’s experimental satellite testing Gemini models and Satlyt’s push for onboard inference. Another key player, Starcloud, currently valued at $2.3 billion, is also working to mitigate the power and cooling constraints of ground-based data centers.

While ambitious, the economic viability of orbital data centers remains unproven. Current evidence relies on vendor-reported roadmaps and funding status, lacking independent verification of large-scale commercial operations or confirmed cost advantages over traditional infrastructure.