Cowboy Space Corporation unveils Big Iron, a rocket that becomes an orbital data center

Most rockets treat their upper stage like a disposable coffee cup. It does its job, then it gets thrown away.

Cowboy Space Corporation wants to keep the cup and turn it into a server farm. On Monday, the company unveiled Big Iron, a rocket whose upper stage is designed to remain in orbit and operate as a megawatt-class data center, according to the company.

The pitch is simple to say and very hard to build. Instead of launching a rocket that drops off a separate satellite, Cowboy Space says the final stage of the rocket is the satellite.

What Big Iron is supposed to do

Cowboy Space is the company formerly known as Aetherflux. It was founded by Baiju Bhatt, who co-founded the trading app Robinhood before turning his attention skyward.

The company says Big Iron can lift more than 15,000 kilograms to sun-synchronous orbit. That is an orbit that keeps a spacecraft passing over the same parts of Earth at the same local time each day, which tends to mean steady sunlight. For a data center that runs on solar power, steady sunlight is the whole ballgame.

Research compiled on the launch puts the rocket at 86 m (282 ft) tall. Its first stage is reusable and powered by nine liquid-oxygen/methane engines the company calls Clydesdales, each producing around 300,000 lbs of thrust.

The upper stage is where things get interesting. It is set to house five NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPU racks, targeting roughly 1 MW of compute capacity per satellite. Each launch is meant to leave behind a small, sun-powered AI cluster circling the planet.

Those satellites are designed to unfold to approximately 132 m by 73 m once deployed.

The Stampede plan and the timeline

Big Iron is not a one-off experiment. It is the delivery vehicle for a planned constellation called Stampede, which Cowboy Space says could include up to 20,000 satellites. The model is one satellite per launch.

The company has submitted an FCC application for the constellation, which is the regulatory step needed before anything at that scale can go up.

Cowboy Space is targeting the first Big Iron launch no earlier than December 2028.

The company has already put hardware in orbit, though. Its Reason-1 satellite launched on October 1, 2026, an earlier milestone on the road to Big Iron.

Cowboy Space is also pitching a service called Big Iron Express. It is aimed at third-party payloads that need substantial power once they reach orbit.

The money and the people behind it

Building rockets is expensive, and Cowboy Space has raised accordingly. In May 2026, it closed a $275 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $2 billion.

Total disclosed equity investment in the company stands at approximately $325-$365 million. Backers include Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.

Operationally, the company runs out of facilities in San Carlos, California, and a dedicated 291,000 sq ft manufacturing site in Kent, Washington.

The company’s roots are in energy rather than computing. As Aetherflux, it focused on space-based solar power, the idea of collecting sunlight in orbit and beaming the energy elsewhere. Cowboy Space says it is continuing that research. The orbital data center concept is, in a sense, a shortcut: rather than beaming power down to Earth, use it right there in orbit.

What this means

The core bet is that power, not chips, is becoming the bottleneck for AI. On the ground, data centers compete for grid capacity, cooling water, and permits. In orbit, the sun is always available on the right trajectory.

The design choice to turn the upper stage into the data center is the most distinctive part of the plan. Conventional launches carry a payload and discard or deorbit the stage that delivered it. By folding the two together, Cowboy Space is trying to squeeze more value out of every launch.

The first real test is still years away, with a debut flight targeted for no earlier than December 2028. Until then, the milestones to watch are the FCC review, further satellite demonstrations following Reason-1, and any signed customers for Big Iron Express.