Aethero

Aethero puts commercial NVIDIA Jetson silicon in orbit instead of radiation-hardened processors. The current flight module runs an Orin NX at up to 157 trillion operations per second, and the follow-on module is designed around AGX Orin or the Blackwell-based Thor. A Linux computer does the work while separate microcontrollers running a real-time operating system supervise it, catching and recovering from upsets, and workloads run in containers so several tenants can share one node.

The bet is that rad-hard silicon is no longer worth its price. A processor built to survive radiation by construction runs years behind the commercial part and costs orders of magnitude more per operation, and Aethero's argument is that shielding plus a watchdog that recovers faster than the failures arrive gets to the same place. Edward Ge and Amit Pinnamaneni came at it from underneath: their first company built high-altitude sensing platforms, and the compute turned out to be the harder problem.

Two spacecraft have flown carrying Aethero modules, in August 2024 and March 2026, and neither has produced published results. The performance figures quoted are the chip vendor's datasheet numbers rather than anything measured in orbit. More significantly, no radiation data exists in public: no total ionising dose, no upset rates, no latch-up behaviour. That is the entire proposition, and there is no public evidence for it in either direction. Power draw and heat rejection are undisclosed too, which matters because a Thor-class processor at full load is a serious thermal problem on a small satellite, and heat is the binding constraint on the orbital data centre the company describes. Roughly nine people and under $10 million raised sit behind that ambition.