Tomorrow, 26 February, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying an Intuitive Machines mission that will stay on the surface of the moon for approximately three weeks before returning to Earth. Among other things, the Intuitive Machines lander contains a mini data center, massing just 1 kilogram and containing 8 terabytes of SSD storage. This belongs to Lonestar Data Holdings and is part of a proof-of-concept mission meant to bring moon-based data centers closer to reality.
The idea of putting a data center on the moon raises a natural question: Why? Lonestar’s CEO Christopher Stott says it is to protect sensitive data from Earthly hazards.
“Data centers, right? They’re like modern cathedrals. We’re building these things, they run our entire civilization. It’s superb, and yet you realize that the networks connecting them are increasingly fragile.”
The Case for Moon-based Data Centers
Indeed, on Earth, undersea cables often get cut, leading to outages. Natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, as well as war, can also disrupt networks or destroy the data itself. The lunar surface is a much more predictable place—there is almost no atmosphere, and therefore no climate events to worry about. There is radiation, but it is fairly constant. And the moon is not a war zone, at least for now.
“We call it resilience as a service,” Stott says. “It’s like a whole new level of backup that we’ve never had before.”
The other motivation is data sovereignty. Over 100 countries worldwide have laws that restrict where certain data can be processed and stored, often to within that country itself. As a data center provider, it’s impossible to accommodate all potential customers in any one location, except in outer space. According to the United Nations’ 1967 outer space treaty, space and the moon are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty,” and as such poses a loophole for data sovereignty laws. An American satellite is under American law, but it can carry a black box inside it that’s under British law, or any other country’s. A moon-based data center can host as many separate black boxes as needed, to accommodate all of its diverse customers.
Governments seem particularly interested in this prospect. This test mission will carry data for the Florida state government as well as for the Isle of Man. They will also carry a copy of Bethesda Games’ Starfield, and will be transmitting the game’s featured song “Children of the Sky” by Imagine Dragons back to Earth throughout the mission, just for fun.
Amit Verma, a professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University Kingsville who is not affiliated with the project, says there may be technical advantages to hosting data on the moon as well. Some parts of the moon are permanently shadowed and therefore extremely cold, as low as -173 °C. This means that no energy or water would need to be expended to cool the data center. And the electrical components will perform more efficiently.
“When you place data centers in environments that are already very, very cold...the performance actually also improves significantly,” Verma says. “Because when you go down in temperature, things like electrical resistance also go down.”
Future moon-based data centers could be powered entirely through solar, since the parts of the moon’s surface that are always cold, near the lunar poles, are relatively close to crater rims that are nearly always exposed to sunlight, unattenuated by an atmosphere. Theoretically, data centers can be hidden away from the sun and power can be transmitted from these rims, resulting in perfectly renewable operation at low temperature.
The Dark Side of the Moon-based Data Center
There are also obvious challenges. First, the moon is far away, which means data will take time to arrive. The one-way latency is 1.4 seconds, which rules out data that needs to be accessed in real time.
“Anything requiring “real-time” compute would be challenging with 1.4 second latency, such as live streaming, gaming, autonomous vehicles or high-frequency trading,” says Kent Draper, chief commercial officer of data center provider IREN who is not involved in the effort. “However, there are many workloads that could still be supported with 1-second-plus processing speeds. For example, AI training workloads or even non-real-time AI inference such as image processing.” But “in addition to high latency, low bandwidth would be a challenge,” Draper adds.
Second, if something breaks on the moon, it is much more difficult to fix.
“Operating data centers for power dense compute is extremely complex, between managing the power and cooling systems, let along configuring servers to client specs,” Draper says. “We have team of experts on-site operating our data centers 24/7, including network engineers, data center technicians, systems engineers, DevOps engineers, solutions engineers, etc.” Lonestar’s Stott argues that this can be mitigated by doing a lot of earth-based testing and including extra redundancy in the data.
Next, while physical interference from wars, hurricanes, and other earthly disturbances is much less likely, cybersecurity continues to be an issue, even on the moon. Texas A&M Verma suggests, however, that since these systems are being built from scratch, they could take advantage of the latest and most secure cybersecurity protocols, making them safer than the average data center on Earth.
Last but not least, it will cost money, as well as research and development time, to figure out how to get larger data centers up there. “Human beings haven’t been to the moon in the last 50 years, but they’re planning on going again in the next ten,” Verma says. “We don’t know how the cost is going to evolve in the future. So there’s a bit of uncertainty. But, it will be a one-time cost.”
Full Steam Ahead
Stott is undeterred by these concerns. Last year, Lonestar tested a virtual data center on the moon (a software container running on third-party hardware aboard an earlier Intuitive Machines mission), and verified that they could communicate from Earth to the virtual data center while it was near and on the moon’s surface by transmitting the Declaration of Independence back and forth. For Stott, this second mission is just the next step in their plan to store data on or near the moon.
Lonestar has plans to next put data centers at the lunar L4 and L5 Lagrange points, gravitationally stable positions along the moon’s orbit. After that, the plan is to put data centers in the moon’s lava tubes, where the internal temperature is roughly a constant -20 °C, which would result in efficient operation without going to the extremes of the lunar poles.
Despite the challenges, Reza Nekovei, another professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University Kingsville, thinks the advantages are big enough to attempt the effort, and there is reason for optimism. “If this thing works out, and they show that this is very feasible, I think within the next few years, data centers is where the money would be, that would be the next driver of space technology.”
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