Space-based and moon-based data centers are being created to support earth and outer space data processing requirements and to provide new data disaster recovery capabilities. Storing data on the Moon or even in near earth orbit has interest to governments, NGOs and commercial enterprises. Data storage in outer space provides an additional layer of data security against natural disasters, social upheavals and other threats to data integrity and longevity.
We wrote about the Lonestar Data Holdings partnership with Flexential to test equipment for a moon based data center as well as sythetic DNA storage in the Blue Ghost Mission in January. The Blue Ghost Mission from Firefly Aerospace landed successfully on the moon on March 2 and has been performing various experiments on the moon’s surface since then. The synthetic DNA in the Blue Ghost Mission carries tokens and historical data and is encapsulated within a monument symbolizing humanity’s achievements.
The Intuitive Machines landing vehicle, containing the Lonestar Holdings Freedom data module made its lunar landing on March 6 and although radio communications works, it appears that the vehicle did not land flat on the surface and as a consequence there was concern whether it would be able to perform some of the planned experiments, including drilling for water near the moon’s Southern Pole, where it is believed that water ice from meteorite impacts may hide in craters that are sheltered from the sun. It is also not clear as of this writing, whether the Freedom data center module is fully functional.
Phison partnered with Lonestar Data Holdings to provide SSD storage based upon the company’s Pascari enterprise-grade storage solution for the Lonestar Freedom Mission. The SSDs are used for Backup and recovery for storing mission data. Phison said that this collaboration would ensure that the Freedom mission moves beyond technical innovation to unlock the future of interplanetary operations. It is hoped that with unique solar-power sourcing and natural cooling capabilities that the lunar data center design can maintain peak operational performance with minimal resource dependency.
Lonestar’s ultimate goal for Freedom is to provide petabyte-scale long-term storage to support local data center needs as well as backup of important data on the Moon’s surface. Data center resources on the Moon will help with edge computing capability to support the upcoming Artemis manned missions to the Moon. Future manned missions further in space, such as Mars, could also benefit from outer space data centers that could support local lower latency processing than is possible for data sent to and from the earth.
A series of data centers distributed in outer space or on other planetary bodies will also enable an extraterrestrial internet, which requires local data storage to cache data and messages locally so they can be transmitted to off-planet and earth transceivers when such transmission becomes possible. Creating a series of data centers between remote space data centers could also enable interplanetary distributed computing to better understand outer space and the solar environment that surrounds us on the earth.
Recent landings of data center technologies including data storage and stored archives on the Moon are creating a path for the development of lunar and other extraterrestrial enterprises.
