Even astronauts wish to stage up their laptops every now and then — together with the team of Expedition 74 on board the ISS, which NASA introduced final week is within the procedure of a few laptop upgrades. In step with NASA, the team met on Friday to check plans to “first substitute community servers then turn on their new, extra tough computer computer systems.” In a remark to The Verge, NASA spokesperson Joshua Finch showed the brand new laptops the astronauts shall be the usage of: “The Global Area Station Program has decided on the HP ZBook G9 Cell Workstation as the following computer for the gap station.”
In step with HP, the customized ZBook Fury G9 for the ISS contains an Intel Core Extremely 9 vPro HX processor, an Nvidia RTX Professional Blackwell GPU, 128GB of DDR5 reminiscence, and 4 2TB NVMe SSDs. The configuration for the ISS additionally wanted a customized “NASA-exclusive” energy adapter, HP says: “The ISS runs principally on DC energy, this means that the usual AC chargers utilized in houses and workplaces on Earth merely received’t paintings there. The G9 cell workstations come with a specifically designed AC/DC adapter that purposes on each the ISS and Earth.”
The primary batch of the brand new laptops was once introduced in October 2025, kicking off the method of upgrading the ISS from HP ZBook Fury G2 laptops to the more moderen G9 model Expedition 74 is unpacking. HP says there are lately over 100 of its workstations in lively use on board the ISS, at the side of HP printers designed to paintings in microgravity. The HP ZBook Fury G9 laptops at the ISS are “the 3rd technology of HP compute platforms onboard.” On the other hand, there may not be many extra computer upgrades in retailer for the ISS — it’s slated to be de-orbited someday in 2030.
Replace, April twenty first: Famous that the ISS is upgrading from older HP ZBook Fury G2 laptops.
