Google Gulfstream lands in St. Louis amid orbital data center talks

Google flew from Morristown Municipal Airport to Spirit of St. Louis Airport on May 20, landing after a two-hour, twelve-minute hop in its Gulfstream G550, N904G. The flight touches down in the St. Louis suburbs the same week that reports confirm Google is in advanced negotiations with SpaceX to launch orbital data centers, per a Wall Street Journal report cited by Bloomberg and TechCrunch. St. Louis is within driving distance of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee, where the company has already signed a deal to supply Anthropic with more than 300 megawatts of AI compute via 220,000 Nvidia GPUs.

The talks come as part of Google’s Project Suncatcher, a moonshot initiative announced last November to launch prototype satellites packed with its own Tensor Processing Units by 2027. SpaceX, which filed for authorization to launch up to a million satellites for orbital data centers, is reportedly seeking to make those economics work as it prepares for a $1.75 trillion IPO later this year. A partnership with Google, which already owns 6.1% of SpaceX per the latest filings, would boost that pitch, according to the same reports.

The arrival in St. Louis follows a pattern of cross-country shuttles: N904G had flown from Moffett Field to the Seattle area just a day earlier, and from London Stansted to Teterboro on May 18. Google’s corporate fleet of two Gulfstream G550s, based at Moffett under a 60-year, $1.16 billion lease, routinely connects the Googleplex with East Coast business hubs and emerging tech corridors. This week, the destination points to a quiet meeting at the intersection of terrestrial cloud and orbital silicon.