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Data Storage Moon

Florida Startup Moves Closer to Building Data Centers on the Moon (gizmodo.com) 133

Posted by BeauHD from the moon-tight-security dept.
Unprecedented access to space is leading to all sorts of cool new ideas, including the prospect of storing data on the lunar surface. Cloud computing startup Lonestar Data Holdings announced the results of its latest funding round, taking it one step closer to this very goal. Gizmodo reports: The Florida-based company raised $5 million in seed funding to establish lunar data centers, Lonestar announced in a press release on Monday. Lonestar wants to build a series of data centers on the Moon and establish a viable platform for data storage and edge processing (i.e. the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth) on the lunar surface. "Data is the greatest currency created by the human race," Chris Stott, founder of Lonestar, said in an April 2022 statement. "We are dependent upon it for nearly everything we do and it is too important to us as a species to store in Earth's ever more fragile biosphere. Earth's largest satellite, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future."

In December 2021, Lonestar successfully ran a test of its data center on board the International Space Station. The company is now ready to launch a small data center box to the lunar surface later this year as part of Intuitive Machines's second lunar mission, IM-2 (the company's first mission, IM-1, is expected to launch in June). Intuitive Machines is receiving funding from NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for delivering research projects to the Moon as part of the space agency's Artemis program. The lunar data centers will initially be geared towards remote data storage and disaster recovery, allowing companies to back up their data and store it on the Moon. In addition, the data centers could assist with both commercial and private ventures to the lunar environment.

The miniature data center weighs about 2 pounds (1 kilogram) and has a capacity of 16 terabytes, Stott told SpaceNews. He said the first data center will draw power and communications from the lander, but the ones that will follow (pending its success) will be standalone data centers that the company hopes to deploy on the lunar surface by 2026. The test is only supposed to last for the duration of the IM-2 mission, which is expected to be around 11-14 days, an Intuitive Machines spokesperson told SpaceNews.
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Florida Startup Moves Closer to Building Data Centers on the Moon

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  • The latency will kill ya (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @02:08AM (#63349295) Homepage

    The Florida-based company raised $5 million in seed funding to establish lunar data centers

    Okay, my question is: Did these investors either not realize this was a data center on the literal moon (as opposed to the old joke about "the movie set where NASA faked the moon landing"), or do they mistakenly believe that the moon now has awesome internet connectivity due to Elon Musk's Starlink network?

    I'd like to think that cryptocurrency and NFTs are the dumbest things people can invest their money in, but, just, damn. I wonder if I can pitch data storage at the bottom of the Mariana Trench to these, uh, savvy investor folks?

    • Perhaps the moon really is the best place to store copies of all those books DeSantis has a problem with. I'd love to see him try to "de-woke" the moon.

      • Just as useful, would be storing books like Dahl's books (such as willy wonka and the chocolate factory) to keep the woke from destroying them.

    • edge processing (i.e. the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth)

      Okay... but the moon is far from everything. Literally everything. It's high latency and low bandwidth to everywhere.

      • Not forgetting the radiation, getting clobbered by every passing rock, wildly fluctuating temps....

      • Okay... but the moon is far from everything. Literally everything. It's high latency and low bandwidth to everywhere.

        You're not thinking enough like a scam artist trying to rip off investors. If you build a perpetual motion machine, you hide a battery in it. In this case, the trick will likely be to have live mirrors of the "moon datacenter", located right here on Earth.

        Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you pesky 299,792,458 metres per second speed limit.

      • It's high latency and low bandwidth to everywhere.

        Low latency? Sure.

        But low bandwidth? Not necessarily. A visible light direct line-of-sight laser transmitter to a terrestrial ground station could easily achieve terahertz bandwidth.

        But I doubt if anyone will run a live database on the moon. This will be for archival storage only.

        • Or heavy compute. Interactive services aren't the only things in data centers.

        • Re:The latency will kill ya (Score:5, Insightful)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @05:14AM (#63349535) Homepage Journal

          Why would you archive stuff on the moon though?

          If the comms link dies, retrieving it will be expensive and slow. The moon is regularly pelted with debris from space, and a lot of radiation, as it has no atmosphere. It experiences extreme temperature cycles, which are not good for archival of data.

          What does the moon offer that storing multiple encrypted copies on Earth does not?

          • hmm i was thinking the same thing. The answer to "What does the moon offer..." is probably "absolutely nothing, it's actually a collosally stupid idea". OK the real estate is cheap up there, but for a lower cost you could probably establish a datacentre in the Hamptons.

            • "for a lower cost you could probably establish a datacentre in the Hamptons" ...or a data center a mile deep in the ocean. That would be as safe as the moon from about every concern or risk. And it would still be more accessable than the moon and also have faster connectivity and availability for servicing, upgrading, expanding, etc.

              • "for a lower cost you could probably establish a datacentre in the Hamptons" ...or a data center a mile deep in the ocean. That would be as safe as the moon from about every concern or risk. And it would still be more accessable than the moon and also have faster connectivity and availability for servicing, upgrading, expanding, etc.

                You can't place it out in the ocean.

                The electromagnetic waves will mess with the navigation of whales, causing them to beach themselves in The Hamptons or The Jersey Shore...anywhere there has been some goofy Reality TV show near the ocean.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Why would you archive stuff on the moon though?

            If the comms link dies, retrieving it will be expensive and slow. The moon is regularly pelted with debris from space, and a lot of radiation, as it has no atmosphere. It experiences extreme temperature cycles, which are not good for archival of data.

            What does the moon offer that storing multiple encrypted copies on Earth does not?

            More to the point, any disaster significant enough to take out multiple earth data facilities is likely to knock our economy back enough to make the moon inaccessible for a while.

            The only advantage I could really see is in power sources. On the moon you can use perpetual solar power or a small nuclear reactor. On earth you need to be attached to a power grid.

            Still, even on earth I don't see a big advantage to putting the data centre in the literal middle of nowhere.

          • Storing it underground on the moon is ideal. Same for Mars. These are not controlled by a nation/government.

            In addition, it prevents the woke and anti-woke from being able to control/ban media from the world.

            Encrypting it on earth is simply a delayed action before a woke/anti-woke/Communist comes after the items to destroy them.

          • Why would you archive stuff on the moon though?

            When the earth is destroyed by a giant asteroid aliens will be able to find a digital archive of all earth's important data on the dead moon in a few millennia when they stumble across the fractured wreckage of our planet!

          • What does the moon offer that storing multiple encrypted copies on Earth does not?

            I can imagine they'll advertise it as being literally out of reach of every government on earth, practically speaking. It might sell to the paranoid-about-the-government-coming-to-raid-my-bunker types, I guess? Or people who are blinded to all logic by the phrase "on the moon!"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Flytrap ( 939609 )

          Well, even if you achieved super-dupa-mega-fast bandwidth (when the moon is in direct line of sight), I still don't understand what the moon offers from a compute or processing perspective that can't be achieved here on earth - at a fraction of the cost.

          Surely it is much cheaper to run power and fibre to a data centre built in the the arctic or antarctic or even under the sea.

          • Able to easily claim that they can't access relevant data when a government/legal action asks for it?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Flytrap ( 939609 )

              Any data that can be read back, can be accessed... whether it is in a data centre down the road, bottom of the ocean, or on the moon. That is why we have zero knowledge encryption [cubbit.io]. It allows companies like Apple, Boxcryptor (RIP), etc. to respond to government data requests without violating their users data confidentiality. Of course governments will try to crack the encryption... and if the data is worth it, they will invest the full might of their government resources to do so... regardless of whether th

              • Ops, sorry, I can't access my moon based data centre.

                Maybe moondust got in. You going to spend a billion bucks to train and send someone up there to verify that it was moondust?

                As for encryption, more and more countries are pushing to have encryption backdoors.

                https://arstechnica.com/inform... [arstechnica.com]

                Now I got "plausible deniablility" as to what happened to my data.

        • While latency will be an issue, the heat will be a huge problem because vacuum is an excellent insulator so cooling your data centre is going to be a major problem. Then there is the power issue, when the sun sets it is two weeks before it rises again which means you need quite a lot of batteries.

          I'm also curious as to what sort of disaster they are planning to recover from. The sort of disaster that would compromise the Earth is not the sort of thing where the survivors are going to be worrying about HR

        • But why the moon? There's no point. Except to take other people's money.

          The goofballs try to claim it's a good place to archive data - maybe if civilization collapses they'll just build a large ladder to grab the data only to learn it's stored in a proprietary format that can't be used without a Microsoft subscription. A worry about Earth's fragile biosphere means put the data in a place that resembles what happens when a fragile biosphere vanishes? And.. "edge computing"? Maybe, if you're edge is the

      • Re:The latency will kill ya (Score:5, Funny)

        by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @05:13AM (#63349527)

        edge processing (i.e. the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth)

        Okay... but the moon is far from everything. Literally everything. It's high latency and low bandwidth to everywhere.

        Sounds like putting a data center there would be ... lunacy. :-)

      • edge processing (i.e. the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth)

        Okay... but the moon is far from everything. Literally everything. It's high latency and low bandwidth to everywhere.

        Just wait until the people living on Muskworld formerly known as Mars discover that just because he puts up a StarLink network there's this problem of getting the twitter feed there and back. Variable latency as well.

        I'm only slightly kidding. I have spoken to a few who actually think that the Mars Internet will somehow be just like earth's intertoobz.

    • From TFS it seems what they want to do is to be the IT department of future permanent moon settlements. The 'datacenter' will store mission data and perform the computing they need (e.g. train AI models on acquired videos), rather than sending many terabytes back to earth, then back from earth to moon after processing.

      One could also think of it as the old saying about the bandwidth of a train full of tape. If a yearly moon mission brings a dozen new 18 Tb disks and brings them back full of data, it's equiva

      • The goal is to have tech for future moon development sounds neat but pay back a long, long, ain t likely to be good time frame. In due time 10 years or so there might be a more plausible use for the moon as a staging site.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by KlomDark ( 6370 )

        TFS? Really? At this time they need to be using GIT, TFS isn't distributed.

      • From TFS it seems what they want to do is to be the IT department of future permanent moon settlements. The 'datacenter' will store mission data and perform the computing they need (e.g. train AI models on acquired videos), rather than sending many terabytes back to earth, then back from earth to moon after processing.

        And that's a great idea. I look forward to it happening when there is data that is generated on the moon that would benefit from local storage and processing. Until then the train full of tape

    • I suspect these investors may be more savvy than you're giving them credit for. But I'm guessing their real goal here is just to make enough early noises regarding initial successes that some deep-pocketed investor/company buys them out for a big profit - not to actually establish any functional data centers on the moon.

    • "or do they mistakenly believe that the moon now has awesome internet connectivity due to Elon Musk's Starlink network?"

      That's where my new startup comes in, Lunar Cable.
      I'm gathering funding to design and deploy the CAT9000+ cable to hook the moon up to Earth.

    • Yeah, but think about the bandwidth!

    • Latency is not the driving factor for cold storage.

    • I can understand the attraction of backup data storage on the unchanging Moon, but how would the "edge processing" part work ?

    • What was the Dragon's Den pitch?
      "This is a two pound micro-datacenter. It will be deployed using the most expensive method in history, and data latency will be measured in seconds. Maintenance will be impossible. We're asking for 400 million."

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • How on Earth will they power the subsequent standalone data centers as soon as 2026 on the f'ing moon? An iPhone?

    • Solar power combined with batteries would be my guess.

      • Or put the panels on a hill near the pole, and then you don't need the battery.

        • It's not that simple.
          Shackleton Crater rim at the South Pole, as well as Peary Crater rim at the North Pole receive most sunlight, but it's around 90% of the time, not 100%.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by KlomDark ( 6370 )

            He meant the electric pole, duh...

          • There are some proposals to simply put the panels up on tall poles - I think you don't actually have to get that far off the ground to get into sunlight that last 10% of the time.

            But at the same time those are tiny locations surrounded by rough terrain - good for initial proof-of-concept outposts, but not so much for exploration or industrial development.

            Which is presumably why China seems to be considering locations much closer to the equator. As an added bonus, near the tropics the moon's subsurface temp

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Askmum ( 1038780 )
      Solar panels?

      But IIRC the daytime temperature of the moon is scorching hot. So you need a lot of cooling as well. And during nighttime it gets colder then hell so you need heating. Because both extremes are well outside the normal operating range of CPUs or SSDs.

      • Temperature fluctuations are trivial to shield against, all it takes is a thick wall. But, if you store some of that heat, there comes lots of free power.

        • Temperature fluctuations are trivial to shield against, all it takes is a thick wall.

          Indeed. You need to go underground to shield from radiation anyway.

          Two meters down, there is very little thermal fluctuation.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            The problem is burying it. You need to send up a machine to dig a hole, put the data centre in it, and cover it over. Moon dust will trash the digging machine pretty fast, so it's probably close to single use.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by KlomDark ( 6370 )

              They will just use the Jewish space lasers to burn a hole in the ground. You're not thinking fourth dimensionally.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

                Land it with enough delta-v and the data center will dig a nice, deep hole all on it's own.

        • A thick heavy wall that costs half a zillion bucks to launch.
          Expensive

    • Not only power it, but how will they cool it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      Wind turbines, duh.
  • See http://server-sky.com/ [server-sky.com] for a better solution.
  • 1. Not stated, the point would obviously be to get out of any legal jurisdiction.. I, for one, don't appreciate that attitude. 2. "Edge processing", as I understand it from my part of industry, is to do processing close (in time and often space) to the point of use of the data, not the place of storage.

  • "Small data center box" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @02:38AM (#63349341)

    Translation: it's a 16TB Western Digital drive enclosed in an Otterbox.

  • $5 million in seed funding (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Arnonyrnous Covvard ( 7286638 ) on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @03:32AM (#63349401)
    Mission accomplished.

  • Isn't this the plot to Nier: Automata?

  • The data centers gone dark again, get to the moon immediately!
  • Why, why why why. $5 million for this is proof humans shouldn't be considered intelligent.
    No grid power means you need to build the power stations yourself. On the moon. And there's no major water source to chill the data center so heat build up is a major problem. Space isn't "cold", it's empty and there's no convection to carry heat away. So now you need giant ir radiators and a loop cooling system. On the moon. And there's no atmosphere or magnetosphere so radiation is going to corrupt your data and fr

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Yalius ( 1024919 )
      Eh, waste heat wouldn't be a problem. You can use the entire moon as your heat sink. Past about 6 feet down, the subsurface temperature of the moon is a pretty even -30F. Sink a heat pipe in and problem solved... yay thermal conductivity! This doesn't negate any of the *other* problems with this idiotic idea, but heat is about the one thing that isn't insurmountable.

  • Wait, so is this just a scam to circumvent data protection laws on earth?

  • Florida Startup Moves Closer to Building Data Centers on the Moon

    Seems a bit much to simply escape having to work in Florida. I mean, there's Texas ... okay, nope.

  • How do they think that they are going to get Data Centers on the moon without trashing our planet in the process.
    Fossil Fuels, Extraction , Pollution.

    Last time i checked its impossible to launch heavy payloads into space without these things.

    Chris Stott is employing a fashionable technique to sell this idea. And idea founded in greenwash and ignorance.

  • "the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth"

    Ah, so the solution to demonstrate processing "near the source" is to put the data as far away as possible from the humans who will ultimately utilize it.

    In an effort to (wait for it)...reduce latency.

    ...The lunar data centers will initially be geared towards remote data storage and disaster recovery..."

    Uh, disaster recovery? And the CEO thought restoring from tape was slow? This anti-latency argument just keeps getting funnier and funnier.

    Do we even ASK the fuck is the point anymore, or should we just preduct right now that the moon is where we're going to eventually jettison Bitcoin mining due to the env

  • Never ceases to amaze. This must be one of the most stupid by far. Still has a good chance of getting money, because many "investors" have no clue how things work.

  • Google says the round trip time between the earth and the moon is under 3 seconds (for radio waves, that is). Is there something soooooo latency sensitive (or perhaps bandwidth intensive) that it can't be done on earth for the low low price of 3 seconds? This boondoggle sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Instead, let's send a Commodore Pet on the next moon shot and just leave it at that for now, at least until we get our space tether, warp drive, hand-held quantum computers and whatnot.

  • When (not if) the data centre goes dead, and the time to go an investigate is weeks and the bill is in the millions, and they find that someone has crashed a probe into it ... who do they sue, under what law, and in what juristriction ...

  • What, April 1st already??

  • Earth's largest satellite, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future.

    Hahaha, are you sure about that?

  • I LOLd when I read this:

    "We are dependent upon it for nearly everything we do and it is too important to us as a species to store in Earth's ever more fragile biosphere."

    If the Earths biosphere collapses then that's the end of humans. So, apart from possible interest from theoretical passing alien historians, who exactly will use this "moon data" after a biospehere collapse ?

    The bullshit is extremely strong with this one... Then again people buy NFTs and "craptocurrency" so there's probably a decent enough

  • This idea has no merit whatsoever. It points to a real sickness in our society that such a looney idea can raise millions of dollars in capital.

    • It points to the fact that they believe their investors are too stupid to know that there is a 2.6 second round trip time for every transaction sent to the moon and back! This smells like a grift to scam gullible investors to me... how are they going to do an onsite inspection to determine there is no actual equipment on the moon?

  • Let alone deal with the complexities of getting machinery into space, powering that machinery, and maintaining it.

  • In what sense are they "closer" to building data centers on the moon? Closer in the sense that they've come out with a press release? Closer in the sense that they got some sucker to give them $5 million?

    OK, so they have a two-pound (1kg) "data center" that must draw power and communications from the lunar lander that brought it to the moon. Basically, a big USB stick? What happens when the lander runs out of power?

    I've been storing my data in the South Central region, let the data transfer to the Lunar reg

  • Yeah, that 2.6 round trop delay is going to be AWESOME! Let's put all the game servers on the moon!
  • Came early this year.
  • Why is this Florida-based company calling itself 'Lonestar'?!? That's a Texas reference. They need to stay in their lane.

    • Why is this Florida-based company calling itself 'Lonestar'?!? That's a Texas reference. They need to stay in their lane.

      Is that the best you can do to whine about that company? Name association? Kinda lame don't you think?

  • One site that ideally should be backed-up to there, pro-bono, would be gutenberg.org.
    Seriously, there are a lot of works that should be preserved.

    Sadly, kids do not read like they used to, but, hopefully, something like this would help change that.
  • Why would you put the datacenter on the moon? The place with no high-energy particle protection, with no magnetic field, which is bombarded by radiation (and meteorites) constantly?

    Why would you voluntarily put all of your infrastructure in an environment that costs many times the usual price to harden your equipment against? Especially when it costs money to send stuff there based on weight, and the lighter storage options are chip-based and more susceptible to corruption from the radiation than platter

    • Cheap electricity from solar power, no weather, no back hoes, and building underground should give No neighbors. _Vastly_ better physical security.

      Counter arguments include the raw expense of shipping parts, the expense of building the facily, and the expense of life support for any engineers or construction workers.

      As far as the cost of shipment, people do ship "Moonboxes" to Luna, DHL is charging $25,8000 for a 1" by 2" capsule.

  • Before trying to figure out electricity on the moon...!?!

  • It sounds like they're using solid-state drives, so unless they're buried a couple of metres underground, they're going to need a LOT of error correction to deal with the cosmic rays ...

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