Sophisticated spacecraft often run on shockingly antiquated computing systems: consider the Perseverance rover running on a PowerPC 750, the processor famous for running iMacs in the late 1990s.
based in San Francisco Aether aims to get more powerful computing systems into orbit, and their first payload is launching this month on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN 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), so to speak, could help unlock a new era for space computing.
Today, electronics in space are protected from harmful radiation in two ways. They are physically shielded, using some combination of materials such as aluminum and tantalum, and are radiation hardened, which generally means that they are designed in ways that increase their tolerance to radiation exposure. The AetherNxN computer is radio-hardened, but the addition of CSC’s shielding “gives us the ability to bring this AI-enabled hardware into space and operate it under these very hostile conditions,” said Aethero co-founder Edward Ge, in a recent interview.
CSC’s armor is a new, 3D-printed material the company calls Plasteel (a term that goes back to Frank Herbert Dune): a mixture of polymers with a uniformly distributed layer of nanoparticles that block radiation. The company was founded in 2020 and has flown a shield of its material 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 space suits.
The company says its material not only reduces the total radiation dose the computer receives, but is also more effective than traditional materials at limiting what’s known as the “single-event effect.” This occurs 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 afforded by the atmosphere.)
While reducing the overall dose is important, mitigating the effects of a single event is also crucial. CSC co-founder and CEO Yanni Barghouty likened it to 100 tennis balls hitting a wall versus a ball. they may have the same total kinetic energy, but the latter is much more dangerous.
Both Ge and Barghouty agreed that next-generation shielding technologies will be needed to get advanced, complex processors into space. Aethero expects its first and largest market being edge processing for Earth observation data—for example, autonomously locating objects of interest—but both companies see a new era of deep space exploration enabled by advanced edge computing in space.
“Nothing this fast, in terms of artificial intelligence, has ever been launched into space,” Barghouty said. “So having this project as it is, it’s literally bringing Moore’s Law into space.”
