Cowboy Space unveils 'Big Iron' rocket to launch 20k AI data centers

Cowboy Space, led by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, unveiled Big Iron, a 282-foot stainless-steel rocket whose reusable first stage is powered by nine methalox Clydesdale engines and whose upper stage becomes a data-center satellite carrying about 1 megawatt of GPU compute. The company plans a constellation of roughly 20,000 such satellites in low Earth orbit, called Stampede, requiring 20,000 launches from launch complexes it calls Trailheads, and aims for a first Big Iron launch in December 2028. Bhatt also announced Big Iron Express for customer payloads, and the company currently operates the Reason-1 satellite, launched Oct. 1 on SpaceX's Transporter-18, to prove out power beaming.