Advanced spacecraft often run on shockingly outdated computer systems: consider that the Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750, the processor that became famous in the late 1990s for running iMacs.
Based in San Francisco Aether aims to put more powerful computing systems into orbit, with their first payload launching this month on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN built on an Nvidia Orin processor, gets extra protection from a new radiation-shielding material the product’s developers used. Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC), could help unlock a new era of space computing.
Today, electronics in space are protected from harmful radiation in two ways. They are physically shielded, using a combination of materials such as aluminum and tantalum, and they are radiation hardened, which generally means they are designed to be more resistant to radiation exposure. The AetherNxN computer is hardened, but by adding CSC’s shielding “we can take that AI-enabled hardware into space and make it work under these very hostile conditions,” Aethero co-founder Edward Ge said in a recent interview.
CSC’s shielding is a new, 3D-printed material that the company calls Plasteel (a term that goes back to Frank Herbert’s shielding). Dune): a polymer mixture with an evenly distributed layer of radiation-blocking nanoparticles. The company was founded in 2020 and has flown its shielding equipment on missions with Axiom Space and Quantum Space. Plasteel is more flexible than aluminum, allowing it to be used for a wider variety of components; the company is even working on adapting it for spacesuits.
The company says the material not only reduces the overall dose of radiation received by the computer, but is also more effective than traditional materials at limiting what are known as ‘single event effects’. This is when a single ionizing particle, such as a high-energy proton, damages or otherwise affects an electronic circuit in space. (These events even occur on Earth, but are extremely rare due to the protection provided by the atmosphere.)
While reducing the overall dose is important, it is also critical to limit the effects of individual events. CSC co-founder and CEO Yanni Barghouty likened it to 100 tennis balls hitting a wall instead of a single bullet; they may have the same total kinetic energy, but the latter is significantly more dangerous.
Both Ge and Barghouty agreed that next-generation shielding technologies will be necessary to bring advanced, complex processors to space. Aethero anticipates its first and largest market This is edge processing for Earth observation data – for example, autonomously identifying objects of interest – but both companies see a new era of deep space exploration enabled by advanced edge computing in space.
“Nothing has ever been launched into space that fast, from an AI perspective,” Barghouty says. “So with this work as it is now, Moore’s law is literally put into space.”