Cowboy Space set out bold development plans to develop its own rocket, targeting a 2028 debut.
Cowboy Space announced the name “Big Iron” and more details about the rocket late Monday, along with plans to offer commercial launch services to commercial and government customers, called “Big Iron Express.”
Big Iron is designed to deploy and add to its planned orbital data center infrastructure. After launch, the upper stage of the rocket is designed to become part of the “Stampede” constellation.
The company started Aetherflux focused on space-based power and then rebranded to Cowboy Space earlier this year, expanding its focus to orbital data centers and associated launch infrastructure. It has filed for 20,000 satellite constellation to provide data center services from space. Baiju Bhatt, one of the co-founders of investing app Robinhood, founded the company in 2024.
“We set out to build data centers in space and found there weren’t enough rockets to get them there, so we’re building our own,” Bhatt said in a release. “Our design puts us on a path to cost parity with terrestrial data centers, so that orbital compute costs less than AI compute on the ground.”
Big Iron is designed as a stainless steel vehicle at 86 meters tall, designed to carry more than 15,000 kg to Sun-Synchronous Orbit. The first stage is reusable, and the upper stage is designed to become a satellite that will form part of the company’s constellation and carry other companies’ payloads. Once deployed it will measure 132 meters by 73 meters and can carry five compute racks of Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs.
