Advanced spacecraft often run on shockingly outdated computer systems: Consider that the Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750 processor, which was made famous by the iMac computers of the late Nineties.
Based in San Francisco Ether goals to put more powerful computing systems into orbit, with the first payload set to launch this month on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 ride-sharing mission. The computer, a small, foldable MVP called AetherNxN built around an Nvidia Orin processor, will get extra protection from a recent radiation-shielding material that the product’s creators, Space Shield Corporation (CSC), could help usher in a recent era in space computing.
Currently, electronic devices in space are protected from harmful radiation in two ways. They are physically shielded, using a combination of materials akin to aluminum and tantalum, and they are radiation-hardened, which generally means they are designed in a way that increases their tolerance to radiation. The AetherNxN computer is radiation-hardened, but adding the CSC shield “enables us to take AI-capable hardware into space and have it operate in these very hostile environments,” Aethero co-founder Edward Ge said in a recent interview.
The CSC shield is a recent, 3D-printed material the company calls Plasteel (the term comes from Frank Herbert): a polymer mix with a uniform 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. Plasteel is more flexible than aluminum, which allows it to be used in a wider range of components—the company is even working on adapting it for spacesuits.
The company says its material not only reduces the total radiation dose a computer receives, but is also more practical than traditional materials at reducing what are often called “single-event effects.” This occurs when a single ionizing particle, akin to a high-energy proton, damages or otherwise affects an electronic circuit in space. (These events occur even on Earth, but are extremely rare because of the protection offered by the atmosphere.)
While reducing the total dose is essential, mitigating the effects of individual events is also key. CSC co-founder and CEO Yanni Barghouty likened it to 100 tennis balls hitting a wall versus a single ball; they could have the same total kinetic energy, but the latter is significantly more dangerous.
Both Ge and Barghouty agreed that next-generation shielding technologies can be needed to bring advanced, complex processors to space. Aethero predicts its first and largest market While they are focused on edge computing of Earth commentary data—for example, autonomously identifying objects of interest—each corporations see a recent era of deep space exploration that can be enabled by advanced edge computing in space.
“Nothing this fast, from an AI perspective, has ever been launched into space,” Barghouty said. “So working like this literally brings Moore’s Law into space.”