Few things are more annoying than dealing with a sluggish, unresponsive laptop, and it’s hard to picture astronauts enduring such delays while living and working on a space station. Since even space travelers aren’t spared the frustration of outdated equipment, NASA is rolling out a significant hardware refresh.
The Expedition 74 crew recently inspected a station-wide computer overhaul scheduled for the weekend, beginning with the installation of updated network servers and followed by the deployment of “new, more powerful laptop computers” aboard the International Space Station.
What HP Laptop Is Heading to Orbit?
NASAA brief update from NASA didn’t specify the hardware model, but a NASA spokesperson later confirmed to The Verge that the station’s next laptop platform is the HP ZBook G9 Mobile Workstation. This model will be replacing the older HP ZBook Fury G2 laptops already in use on the ISS, with the first batch of the newer systems having launched back in October 2025.
How Powerful Are These Laptops?
The International Space Station NASAHP’s new laptops are powerful workstation-grade systems. The custom ISS configuration features an Intel Core Ultra 9 vPro HX processor, an Nvidia RTX Pro Blackwell GPU, 128GB of DDR5 memory, and four 2TB NVMe SSDs. While these are specs you won’t commonly find on a consumer-grade laptop, HP states that these new machines also need a specially designed NASA-exclusive AC/DC power adapter, since the ISS primarily runs on DC power and standard Earthbound AC chargers would not work in orbit.
More than 100 HP workstations are already in active use on the ISS, along with microgravity-compatible printers, and the G9 machines represent the third generation of HP compute platforms onboard. With the station set to be decommissioned in 2030, this might be one of, if not the last, big PC refresh before the planned deorbit.