Lonestar to Place Data Centers on the Moon
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 19, 2022 (Lonestar Data PR) — Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. announced today that it is launching a series of data centers to the lunar surface and has contracted for its first two missions to the lunar surface and for the build of its first data services payload, the first data center to the Moon.
The VC funded startup is revolutionizing data services and communications from Earth’s largest satellite, the Moon, by providing a platform for critical data infrastructure, and edge processing, further leveraging its ITU spectrum filings to enable broadband communications.
Lonestar sees the Moon as the ideal location to serve the premium segment of the $200 billion global data storage industry while addressing key environmental and growing biosphere concerns triggered by the increasing growth of data centers around the world.
“Data is the greatest currency created by the human race,” said Chris Stott, Founder of Lonestar. “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.”
Following the success of the company’s groundbreaking edge data center test on the ISS in December 2021, working with Canonical and Redwire, Lonestar is now pressing ahead with the first of its lunar data centers.
Lonestar has contracted to perform a series of advanced service tests on Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission, which is headed near Marius Hills in the larger Oceanus Procellarum, and then to fly their first full data services payload on Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 to the lunar pole. Lonestar has also made the necessary spectrum filings for its missions from the ITU with the Moon as their focus.
“Our turnkey solution for delivering, communicating, and commanding customer payloads on and around the Moon is revolutionary,” said Steve Altemus, President, and CEO of Intuitive Machines.” Adding Lonestar Data Holdings and other commercial payloads to our lunar missions are critical steps toward Intuitive Machines creating and defining the lunar economy.
The build of the first ever data center payload for Lonestar’s proof-of-concept service has been contracted with Skycorp.
“Skycorp is pleased to be able to provide our advanced multi-core RISC-V in space server architecture to the forward thinking team at Lonestar,” said Dennis Wingo, CEO and Founder of Skycorp. “Our system is currently operating as the world’s first web server on the International Space Station and we look forward to supporting Lonestar in their groundbreaking Lunar application next year.”
Founded by Chris Stott, former CEO of ManSat, Mark Matossian, previously CEO of Iceye US and Head of Data Center Hardware Manufacturing at Google, Carol Goldstein, former ABN AMRO and Morgan Stanley banker, and Del Smith, former Senior Space Business Counsel at Dentons, Lonestar draws from a deep well of experienced leaders from both cloud and space industries.
Lonestar is a rapidly growing VC funded lunar startup. The company’s Seed round is being led by Scout Ventures, and has been joined by Seldor Capital and 2 Future Holding.
Believing both form and function are important as the world’s data takes this next giant leap, Lonestar is also working with world renowned architectural firm, BIG, for the exterior design of their first lunar data center.
About Lonestar – Saving Earth’s Data One Byte at a Time
Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. (Lonestar®), headquartered in St Petersburg’s Maritime and Defense Technology Hub, has been founded by a proven team of experts from the Cloud and Space verticals to pioneer a future for data at the edge for all of us. Lonestar is fueled by remarkable and visionary investors led by Scout Ventures, Seldor Capital, and 2 Future Holding.
16 responses to “Lonestar to Place Data Centers on the Moon”
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About time someone recognized that lunar business models are going to be digital and service based, not commodity based like most space advocates believe. Lunar resources will be used mostly for lunar and space economic activities and only indirectly for Earth based activities. .
I disagree, at least for now.
This kind of business model does not make sense (yet) in my opinion.
Without drastic reductions in launch costs (incoming with Starship et al) and most of all dramatic increase in available in-space bandwidth, a datacenter on the moon is pretty much pointless and only serves as an “academic experiment”…
You miss the point which is that they are starting in the right direction by moving beyond the outdated 20th Century lunar business model of mining raw materials for Earth. The first personal computers did not look like much, but through iterative development they became the smart phone and laptop. The same process will be moving this forward now that someone is starting on the journey of development.
There will be plenty of mining, refining and fabricating done on the Moon and in cis-lunar space. But, except for souvenir tchochkes, none will be for export to Earth. All sorts of cis-lunar businesses will need low-latency computing and storage. The cis-lunar economy will become quite variegated and sophisticated in fairly short order.
I am trying to figure out what are the advantages of this over terrestrial storage. I will think on it after a long day flying 🙂
None.
Beyond the disasters that you have on Earth, war, weather, earthquakes, looters. The Moon is a very stable environment and because it is difficult for folks to reach a very safe one. Basically it’s the digital version of storing records in salt mines on Earth, which is actually a substantial business. But to really be able to keep it safe they will need to go underground into the lava tubes and use RTG for power.
RTGs will be entirely irrelevant to lunar power infrastructure – too limited, inefficient and expensive.
To expand on my very brief previous reply, let me count some of the ways that this is more of a “we can do this so we will” idea more than a “this is the most practical way to do this” idea:
1) While lag won’t be a issue for data that is just cold-stored (pun intended) on lunar data centers, any kind of interactive data will be very frustrating to deal with. Same reason (albeit on a much larger scale) as why no one ever weaponized the Moon.
2) The lunar environment is harsh. Temperature extremes will require quite a bit of power for heating during the lunar night and cooling during the lunar day, over and above the already large power draws.
3) Data centers are notorious power hogs. A big reason Apple, Facebook, and Google have data centers in NC is we have some of the cheapest power in the US. Same reason they are in some western states where hydro power dominates. I don’t see this kind of power generation on the Moon anytime soon, so these “data centers” will necessarily be quite small affairs. Which in turn calls into question their usefulness in the long run.
4) These will have to be very well shielded to alleviate problems with cosmic rays and solar flares.
5) I’m not sure how “secure” these would be considered, since they are not manned. Robot defenses? If SS/SH does make going to the Moon easy, at least by today’s standards, I doubt they’ll be considered secure.
There are likely more reasons. I’m also sure the developers considered all these pitfalls and still decided to go ahead. Or perhaps they just ginned up this idea to get some investment which will fund primarily themselves, with nothing actually being produced in the end.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s not even clear the proposers can do this.
The is a difference between the idea and the organization that executes it. Surface installations like this will be a problem, but the will only be pathfinders for the technology the business model requires with limited storage abilities.
Lava Tubes solve three of those problems, having many meters of shielding and a constant low temperature. Data Centers are energy hogs because of the heat they generate, so the low temperatures in the lava tubes will be a plus not to mention an easily secured entrance.
hope it works out
yeah exactly I dont see any value in this. they have tried to mitigate “some” of them. the lunar poles should assuming some sort of “peak” have near constant solar power and cleverly done should have a more or less constant temperature with easy heat sinking
but the rest of the issues are going to be large ones. including “power hungry” devices. I assume security would be “awesome” because the system can be designed to only interogate by company earth stations…|
well lets see. I hope they make it and get some customers. anything that makes money would be a welcome addition to a lunar environment
The view of Earth in the illustration would indicate a polar location.
I think that the prose says it as well. the lunar poles is the only place that doesnt need an RTG
Power generation and distribution is going to be one of the early large industries on the Moon. Lunar data centers could well be demand leaders in driving build-out of energy infrastructure. Energy infrastructure, in turn, will be one of the drivers of mining and refining capacity.
Kudos to Dennis Wingo who works on this project!