Sophisticated spacecraft often run on surprisingly outdated computing systems: Consider that the Perseverance rover is powered by a PowerPC 750, the processor famously powered by iMacs in the late 1990s.
Based in San Francisco Ethereal The goal is to put more powerful computing systems into orbit, and its first payload is set to launch this month on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN that’s built on an Nvidia Orin processor, will receive additional protection from a new radiation-shielding material that the product’s developers, Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC), they say could help unlock a new era for computing in space.
Currently, electronic devices in space are protected from harmful radiation in two ways. They are physically shielded, using a combination of materials like aluminum and tantalum, and they are radiation-hardened, which generally means they are designed in ways that increase their tolerance for radiation exposure. The AetherNxN computer is radiation-hardened, but adding CSC shielding “allows us to take that AI-capable hardware into space and have it operate in these very hostile conditions,” Aethero co-founder Edward Ge said in a recent interview.
CSC’s shielding is a new 3D-printed material the company calls Plasteel (a term that dates back to the work of Frank Herbert). Dune): a polymer blend with an evenly distributed layer of radiation-blocking nanoparticles. The company was founded in 2020 and has used its shielding material on missions with Axiom Space and Quantum Space. Plastesteel is more flexible than aluminum, allowing it to be used in a wider variety of components; the company is even working on adapting it for spacesuits.
The company claims that its material not only reduces the overall radiation dose to a computer, but is also more effective than traditional materials at limiting what are known as “single-event effects” – when a single ionizing particle, such as a high-energy proton, damages or otherwise affects an electronic circuit in space (such events can occur even on Earth, but are extremely rare because of the shielding provided by the atmosphere).
While reducing the total dose is important, mitigating the effects of a single event is also vital. CSC co-founder and CEO Yanni Barghouty compared it to 100 tennis balls hitting a wall compared to a single bullet: they may have the same total kinetic energy, but the latter is considerably more dangerous.
Both Ge and Barghouty agreed that next-generation shielding technologies will be needed to bring advanced and complex processors into space. Aethero anticipates Its first and largest market being edge processing for Earth observation data (for example, autonomously identifying interesting objects), 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 so fast from an AI perspective,” Barghouty said. “So for this work to work the way it does is literally bringing Moore’s Law to space.”
