Artist's illustration of Cowboy Space's newly announced Big Iron rocket lifting off. (Image credit: Cowboy Space)

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Cowboy Space just showed us how it plans to become a big player in the final frontier.

The California-based company, which is run by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, intends to operate a constellation of 20,000 AI data centers in low Earth orbit (LEO). It will build those satellites in house and launch them on a homegrown rocket — a vehicle Cowboy Space unveiled here on Monday night (Oct. 26), at an event it called "Big Sky Rising."

"It's a fundamentally novel approach to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion," Bhatt said during the event. "The idea is that you have a two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite."

Big Iron's first stage will be reusable. The upper stage will serve as a data-center satellite after reaching orbit. (Image credit: Cowboy Space)

That rocket is called Big Iron, Bhatt told us on Monday night.…