Last week we were accepted into NVIDIA Inception, the program NVIDIA runs for early-stage companies building on its platforms. We are a small team and this is a small announcement, but it changes something concrete about how we build, so it is worth a few paragraphs.

What we applied with

The application was not about the planner. The planner runs on the ground and does not care whose silicon it schedules onto. It was about the other half of the platform: the Operator Agent, the Rust process that runs on the satellite, pulls work during contact windows, executes it, and streams events back.

Almost every on-board compute payload flying or being built right now runs on a Jetson. NVIDIA’s March announcements made that explicit, with Jetson Orin positioned as the module for on-satellite processing and the IGX Thor and Space-1 parts for the heavier end. If the agent is going to run where the workloads are, it has to be first-class on that hardware, and until now we have been doing that work on borrowed boards and emulation.

So the thing we told NVIDIA we would do is bring the agent up properly on Jetson Orin as the reference on-board target, with the GPU-side execution path exercised for real rather than mocked. That is the critical path for us and it is the one we committed to.

What changes

Practically, Inception gives us access to hardware and to engineering resources we would otherwise have had to wait for. It means the Orin bring-up happens on real modules rather than on whatever we could find. It means the workload kinds that assume an accelerator, on-board inference first among them, get validated against the chip they will actually run on.

It does not mean a product announcement. The agent is published on crates.io and has been since March, and nothing about it changes today. When the Orin target is solid we will say so, with numbers, in the usual place.

Why this matters for the thesis

We have said for a year that the hard part of orbital compute is the software, not the hardware. That is still what we think. But the software has to meet the hardware somewhere, and in orbit that somewhere is increasingly a Jetson bolted to a satellite bus. Being inside the program that supports that hardware shortens the distance between the plan the ground produces and the process that carries it out.

Thanks to the Inception team for the welcome. Back to work.