We are looking far afield for the future of data centers: in deserts, under the sea, and of course, in space. Data centers in strange places are steadily moving from the realm of imagination to reality. Lonestar Data Holdings, for one, recently achieved milestones in testing its commercial lunar data center in orbit.
How does Lonestar’s most recent mission push us forward on the path to commercial data centers around and on the Moon? What are the unique challenges that must be solved for launching and maintaining these data centers? As more governments and enterprises look to space, what lies ahead for competition and cooperation on the Moon and beyond?
The Mission
On Feb. 26, Lonestar launched its Freedom data center payload onboard the Athena Lunar Lander, a commercial Moon lander sent by American space exploration company Intuitive Machines.
The landing did not go exactly as planned. The system landed on its side and powered down days earlier than anticipated, CNN reports. But Lonestar achieved several testing milestones prior to the landing.
The company’s technology demonstrated its ability to operate in the harsh environment of space. Lonestar was able to test its data storage capabilities and execute edge processing functions.
Lunar Opportunities and Challenges
Lunar data centers offer a number of advantages over their terrestrial counterparts. Ready access to solar power and natural cooling are useful, and their remote location is key to their appeal.
“Throw in all the problems with climate change, natural disasters, human error, wars, nation states going after immutable data that’s held in data centers,” says Chris Stott, CEO of Lonestar. Data center customers want to put their data somewhere that is secure, accessible, and in compliance with data sovereignty laws. And space beckons.
While the promise of lunar data centers as a core piece of resiliency and disaster recovery strategy is clear, there is a lot of work being poured into making them a tangible, commercial option.
Cost is an obvious hurdle for any space-based project. But given the appetite for space exploration and commercialization, there is certainly money to be found. Lonestar raised $5 million in seed funding in 2023, and the company is working on finishing its Series A funding, according to Stott.
Other companies with celestial data center ambitions are attracting millions, too. Starcloud, previously Lumen Orbit, has raised more than $20 million, according to GeekWire. Starcloud is focused on space-based data centers not on the Moon but in low Earth orbit.
Companies need that kind of funding because it is expensive to launch these data centers and to design them. A lunar data center isn’t going to look like one you would see on Earth.
“When you take something into space, you have to redesign everything,” Stott acknowledges.
The data center needs to operate in the vacuum of space. It needs to be built with space-qualified material; it must meet low outgassing criteria. It needs to be able to operate in an environment of extremes.
On the lunar surface, a data center would be faced with two weeks of day and two weeks of night.
“You’ve got 250 degrees Celsius in the sun,” says Stott. “But when it gets to lunar night it goes … instantly to minus 200 degree Celsius. It gets really cold. So cold it fractures silicone.”
Lonestar is focusing its near-term efforts on placing its data centers at Lagrange points, specific spots between the Earth and Moon in which objects remain stable. With this approach, the data center will only experience four hours of shade every 90 days, and it will have batteries to power it during that time, Stott explains.
“That changed everything for us because it means we don’t have to wait for a ride to the Moon. We don’t have to use a lunar lander. We can solve the day-night issue,” he adds.
Terrestrial data centers have white space and grey space. The former includes the servers and racks, while the latter supports those: communication, cooling, power. The same concept applies to space-based data centers, but the white space is referred to as a payload.
“It’s the load that pays … whether it be a camera or whether it be an astronaut or whether it be a data center,” says Stott. “Then our gray space: power, thermal and communications. It’s the satellite, it’s the solar panels, the batteries for power, and satellite antennas for communications.”
When something in a data center fails or breaks in a terrestrial data center, it is a relatively simple matter to have someone walk in the door and fix it. Those boots on the ground aren’t exactly a readily available option for lunar data centers.
Gregory Ratcliff is chief innovation officer at Vertiv, a company that provides critical infrastructure solutions, including data centers. Vertiv is not directly involved in lunar data center projects, but it has plenty of experience here on Earth.
Ratcliff tells InformationWeek, “Fault tolerance is really going to matter. [You’ll] have a redundancy of systems, redundancy of those servers and in some cases, you might just let it fail until you do the upgrade and work around it, which is a little different than we do in modern data centers on Earth.”
And then, of course, there are the logistical demands of arranging to launch anything into space. “They always say the hardest thing about getting to space is getting permission,” says Stott.
A Commercial Offering
Caddis Cloud Solutions, an advisory firm that specializes in data center development, is working with Lonestar. “We’re really the … organization helping vet customers, understand the technical solutions that customers are looking for, presenting those solutions, helping them build out the physical infrastructure on ground,” Caddis Cloud Solutions CEO Scott Jarnagin tells InformationWeek.
Lonestar’s lunar data center aims to provide resiliency as a service and disaster recovery and edge processing services. And already there are government and enterprise customers on board. It is working with the state of Florida to provide data storage, for example. On the edge processing side, Lonestar counts Vint Cerf, one of the trailblazers behind the architecture of internet, among its customers.
Lonestar is also working with other data center operators. “They can provide the solutions to their customers as an extension of disaster recovery services,” Jarnigan explains.
Lonestar is planning to launch six data storage spacecrafts between 2027 and 2030. They will orbit the Moon at the Lunar L1 Lagrange Point.
“Each one carrying multi petabytes worth of storage and doing a ton of edge processing as well. Think of it like a smart device up in orbit around the moon,” says Stott. “And they are precursors to what we’ll put in the moon later on.”
It is booking capacity for those upcoming missions.
While Lonestar is gearing up for those next missions, it is not alone in the world of space-based data centers. Plenty of companies, like Starcloud, are working on low Earth orbit data centers. Stott considers Lonestar to be a “different flavor” of space-based data center.
“We are a very niche, premium, high-latency, high-security application. We don’t want to be close to the planet. We want to be far enough away that we can still operate safely and have line of sight communications without any of the other complications that come with that,” he says.
The Future of Data Centers
While Lonestar is starting its commercial data centers in lunar orbit, it still plans to return to the surface of the Moon.
And, of course, there is plenty of interest focused on launching a plethora of lunar technology. NASA’s Artemis program is focused on establishing long-term presence on the Moon. The Lunar Surface Technology Research (LuSTR) program and Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative are driving the development of technologies to support Artemis missions to the Moon, as well as exploration on Mars.
As Lonestar and other space-based data center initiatives advance, what of terrestrial data centers?
Ratcliff anticipates that advances made in lunar data centers will be useful here on Earth as well. “It’ll feed backwards … power routing, sensor optimization, digital twins,” he says. “So, this is going to push us to be better both on Earth and on the Moon.”
For now, the Moon feels almost like a blank slate. But as more and more public and private enterprises launch lunar satellites and establish technology on its surface, competition for real estate — for data centers and otherwise — will heat up.
While wealthy governments and enterprises will have a leg up in the competition, it isn’t going to be a complete free-for-all. Plenty of space law exists today. Any initiative that goes to the Moon is subject to the laws of its country of origin.
“If you’re an American company and you’re flying in space, American law applies to you. You don’t get to skip anything,” says Stott.
Even within the bounds of law, there is an element of racing. Companies and countries want to reap the benefits of lunar initiatives. “Back in the 60s, it was flags and footprints. Today, it’s resources and revenue,” says Stott. “When we’re looking at the Moon, it is now just part of Earth’s economics sphere. It’s just another place we go to do business.”
But there is also a history of collaboration in space. “If you think back just not too long ago, the ISS [International Space Station] was built by a whole bunch of different countries … it was completely outside of politics and seems to work pretty well,” Ratcliff points out.
The groups developing and launching lunar technology will have to figure out how to do so without compromising safety, and that will require at least some level of cooperation with one another.
Success on the Moon is likely just the beginning for the data center industry. “One day we will have Martian data centers. We will have Jovian based data centers. Anywhere that humanity goes, we now take two things with us: the law and data,” says Stott.
In all likelihood, we will have something else with us: cybercriminals. Space may be far more remote than any corner we could find here on Earth, but that doesn’t mean threat actors won’t seek and find vulnerabilities that enable cyberattacks in space .
“We are a hedge against terrestrial problems, but, of course, we have to stay one step ahead in terms of cybersecurity,” Stott recognizes.