Even astronauts need to level up their laptops from time to time — including the crew of Expedition 74 aboard the ISS, which NASA announced last week is in the process of doing some computer upgrades. According to NASA, the crew met Friday to review plans to “first replace the network servers and then activate their new, more powerful laptop computers.” in a statement to The VergeNASA spokesman Joshua Finch confirmed the new laptop to be used by the astronauts: “The International Space Station program has selected the HP ZBook G9 Mobile Workstation as the next laptop for the space station.”
According to HP, the custom ZBook Fury G9 for the ISS includes an Intel Core Ultra 9 vPro HX processor, an Nvidia RTX Pro Blackwell GPU, 128GB of DDR5 memory, and four 2TB NVMe SSDs. Configuration for the ISS also requires a custom “NASA-exclusive” power adapter, HP says: “The ISS runs primarily on DC power, meaning that standard AC chargers used in homes and offices on Earth will not work there. The G9 Mobile Workstation includes a specially designed AC/DC adapter that works both on the ISS and on Earth.”
The first batch of new laptops was launched in October 2025, beginning the process of upgrading the ISS from HP ZBook Fury G2 laptops to the new G9 edition Expedition 74. HP says it currently has more than 100 of its workstations in active use on the ISS, as well as HP printers designed to work in microgravity. The HP ZBook Fury G9 laptops on the ISS are “the third generation of the onboard HP compute platform”. However, there may not be many laptop upgrades in store for the ISS – it is expected to be de-orbited sometime in the 2030s.
Update, April 21: It is noteworthy that the ISS is upgrading from an older HP ZBook Fury G2 laptop.
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