Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Florida-based startup Lonestar Data Holdings plans to launch the first Moon-based data center dubbed the "Freedom Data Center." The compact but fully operational information hub will piggyback on an upcoming lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February. Lonestar says storing data on the Moon offers unique benefits.
First, it provides unmatched physical security and protection from natural disasters, cyber threats, and geopolitical conflicts that could put Earth-based data at risk. The solar-powered mini-facility is also much more environmentally friendly than energy-hungry data centers on our home planet, utilizing naturally cooled solid-state drives.
The company has already lined up some high-profile early customers for their lunar platform, including the state of Florida, the Isle of Man government, AI firm Valkyrie, and the pop rock band Imagine Dragons.
The company has been working towards this milestone for years, successfully testing data storage on the Moon in February last year and aboard the International Space Station in 2021. However, putting something as complex as a data center on the lunar surface is still an enormous technical challenge.
The harsh environment, maintenance difficulties, and astronomical costs could create some problematic issues. There are also inherent risks associated with space launch. There is no option for equipment recovery if something goes wrong. Thankfully, the data center will have a ground-based backup at a Flexential facility in Tampa.
Lonestar has yet to release specific operational details or hardware specs. It will be interesting to see the company's plans for communication between lunar and ground-based facilities.
Lonestar isn't the only venture planning to establish a lunar data center. Reuters reports that several other companies are eyeing similar space-based facilities, including Lumen Orbit, which recently raised $11 million at a $40 million valuation.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Tuesday January 28, @09:30AM (9 children)
> The solar-powered mini-facility is also much more environmentally friendly than energy-hungry data centers on our home planet, utilizing naturally cooled solid-state drives.
Shame about the tonnes of rocket fuel required to get it to the moon. At least some fraction is burnt in space (but also the oxygen goes to space as well).
To ask the obvious, what happens when a SSD dies and needs replacing? Junk the server and launch a new one is hardly eco either.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FunkyLich on Tuesday January 28, @09:46AM (2 children)
You only mentioned SSDs, but the same actually applies to CPU, network equipment, mainboards... every electronic component present actually.
I also wonder whether the exposure to solar radiation or other kinds of radiation of which on Earth we are shielded from the atmosphere and the magnetosphere of the planet, might have a higher harmful impact for this on the Moon, or not.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Tuesday January 28, @09:51AM
> solar radiation
That's a good point. It would be nice if they figured out how to build a bunker on the moon for radiation shielding and got some of the related infrastructure up there - might actually be useful.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Wednesday January 29, @12:16PM
Absolutely. The moon has two hundred times the radiation levels of the earth, TFA doesn't say what this "data centre" is but I doubt it'll be useful for much, you're either going to get constant faults due to SEE (single event effects) or need programmers who can write rad-hard code, of which there are... not many.
The whole thing quacks like a VC funding grab, it's not a "data centre" but some small-scale embedded PC or similar because you can't transport, power, or cool anything more significant, you've got a multi-second latency for any comms, and you're going to get neverending faults in your data and computations. The fact that Florida has enthusiastically signed up for it tells you what a harebrained scheme it is.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 28, @04:22PM
Cooling is easy. Staying warm during the lunar night is harder. Perhaps they could mine bitcoins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Tuesday January 28, @05:38PM
How is putting it on the moon supposed to protect it from cyber threats?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Informative) by Frosty Piss on Tuesday January 28, @07:43PM (3 children)
This is not a commercial project. It's is what's called a "test", an "experiment", "research"... That sort of thing. In fact, the failure of the equipment is part of the research project.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday January 29, @08:52AM (2 children)
> This is not a commercial project
That's not what I understood from TFA. E.g. phrases like:
> high-profile early customers
> raised $11 million at a $40 million valuation.
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Thursday January 30, @05:40PM (1 child)
Please utilize your brain. Before rolling out a commercial version, they are testing out the equipment and various possibilities, the failure points. Surely you are that stupid that you don't understand this?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday January 30, @05:59PM
> Please utilize your brain
After you, my dear sir.
> Before rolling out a commercial version, they are testing out the equipment and various possibilities
K thx bye.
(Score: 3, Touché) by looorg on Tuesday January 28, @10:54AM (3 children)
So this is just some kind of gimmick then. "Data center" on the moon. I guess the surface on the moon is going to be dotted by cubes filled with disks. When they fail they just stay there, like some moon surface ornament. Get a bunch of them and they might build some kind of network and share load.
Sending data there and recovering data from the moon is probably going to suck time wise, that said it's not a conversation so the second or two probably probably won't matter all that much.
Or are the "servers" just going to sit inside a/the lander that they land on the moon? I don't see how they would actually build a structure on the moon. So I don't quite see any alternative to that.
Or is swapping equipment going to be a job for Roger Wilco, space janitor/server technician?
Earth is the backup to the moon storage? OK ... sure ... keep selling that one. On the other hand if you have your data center in Florida then perhaps that actually is the case.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday January 28, @10:57AM (1 child)
I should have loaded in the images, and read another paragraph. They apparently look like little towers.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 28, @04:33PM
So their strategy to survive the lunar night is probably to land a tower on one of the poles and rotate the solar panels to face the earth.
Good news: Moon has two poles
Bad news: Moon only has two poles, this isn't going to scale very well.
Sure, put up a taller tower and operate at a more equatorial lattitude, or moonitude or whatever its called. The required height to always see the sun nearby the poles, would be about the "distance to the horizon vs altitude" equation. Can't use the earth one because it's got a different radius than the moon. From a 100M tower on earth you can see 36 KM at the horizon (assuming flat earth), if I didn't mess up the numbers. On the moon you can only see about 19 KM on that tower. So you have to be pretty close to the pole with a pretty tall tower on the moon to get continuous sunlight... this is not going to scale well.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 28, @11:50AM
(To Futurama's Whalers on the Moon):
We're servers on the moon
We've been here since last June
But there ain't no sales
for Ruby on Rails
We store crypto for drug goons.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 5, Funny) by donkeyhotay on Tuesday January 28, @01:46PM (2 children)
Call me cynical, but this whole thing sounds like bs. They mention a "backup" system on earth. I suspect that is really where the data will be stored. What is being sent to the moon are empty boxes with blinking lights, similar to "the Internet" on the IT Crowd.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 28, @02:28PM (1 child)
Shit... when looking up what you meant about "the Internet" on the IT Crowd, i was on Google, but i accidentally typed Google INTO Google and
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2, Funny) by khallow on Wednesday January 29, @12:53AM
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28, @02:07PM
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a translunar rocket full of flash drives hurtling through space.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday January 28, @02:40PM
The RIAA and MPAA are gonna' be pissin' themselves over the moon about this.
How do they get a court order to raid the lunar servers? OMG people might hear unlicensed music or see unlicensed movies that are no longer available! There might even be out of copyright books in virtual lunar libraries where people could . . . OMG! . . . read!
How many torrents can these servers host?
Ships can't cut the undersea cables.
OMG, think of dem chilldens!
OMG, the sky is falling, assuming it can achieve lunar escape velocity.
Stop asking "How stupid can you be?" Some people apparently take it as a challenge.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 28, @04:18PM
Nobody wants to talk about the finances? First of all this is pretty small potatoes. Thats about "a falcon 9 launch" and that has successfully tossed payloads into TLI orbit and its VERY handwavy but some thousands of kilos seems reported online. So figure maybe a hundred kilos payload landed on the moon. Because the numbers are rough, its not an awful estimate to say they can buy 100 KG of datacenter on the moon. Radio gear and batteries and (how do they power this during the lunar night?) stuff figure 50 KG of SSD on the moon. Your classic M2 SSD is "like twenty grams". So figure 1TB M.2 SSDs and thats 2500 of them (good luck finding hardware to plug them all in) and thats 2.5 PB of deep storage on the moon, more or less backing up the faster internet connected storage in Texas as per the article. There are, of course, other expenses. I don't feel all that unreasonable claiming 1000 TB of storage on the moon could have a capex of $40M.
As for revenue, last time I checked AWS S3 Glacier Frozen Deep Archives or whatever BS name they have was $1/TB*month, and AWS LOVES to charge extra for bandwidth and the same service costs about IIRC $20/TB in and out. So it costs more to transfer than to store for about three years, but storage costs more than transfer after about four years. Also AWS billing is an intentional confuseopoly probably AI generated to be confusing as hell so I might be wrong. The single biggest PITA about AWS is their business model seems to be generate unpredictable billing revenue after business lock-in occurs. Anyway. If AWS deeply chilly glacier or WTF its called would generate about $1000/month revenue for this data center. This being on the moon, I BET they could charge 1000 times as much as AWS. At least until Amazon opens a data center of their own on the moon and undercuts them, also probably opens a distribution center to sell chinese plastic fake products to space aliens. Anyway, it seems it would cost $40M upfront capex to generate about $12M/yr revenue. Thats pretty good.
I wonder about scalability. Its "easy" to make a RAID array of multiple centers on the moon, but filling hundreds, thousands, millions of PB will take a lot of uplink transmitter antennas and a lot of time. I THINK we could launch them faster than we could fill them at the current spacex rate even with aggressive earth side station construction. Lasercom systems? If we ever built a tethered geosync satellite we could hang a fiber from it but running a fiber from earth to moon might be tricky. As some point a VERY LARGE spacecraft towing shipping containers full of SSD to the moon and back every couple days might be the highest BW earth-moon system we can invent. I'm sure the first PB of storage will sell for much more than the 12345th PB of storage, so there's that, too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Username on Tuesday January 28, @06:36PM
It's only a 0.005 kilosecond ping with unlimited data transfer!
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Thursday January 30, @12:37PM
The moon is dotted with crators. What is their creation rate?