LASTAR DATA HOLDINS, an emerging company based in Florida, is immersed in a singular project: Install the first Data Center on the Moon. To do this, at the end of February, I already board a Falcon 9 rocket of Spacex, will launch a first test module (compact, but totally operational) called «Freedom Data Center».
The space race has attracted numerous private companies, giants such as Spacex, but also smaller companies that want to participate in an incipient business. And for all types of tasks, including a Space Data Center Concept which is gaining ground as the energy needs drastically increase to maintain these operations on Earth.
First Data Center on the Moon
LASTAR says that storing data on our satellite will offer “Unique benefits”. On the one hand, it will have an unmatched physical security and protection against natural disasters, cybernetic threats and geopolitical conflicts that could put land data at risk.
In addition, these designs, much smaller than their earthly counterparts, They will be fed with solar energymore environmentally respectful than existing data centers that consume a lot of energy, since the cooling of storage units (solid state units or SSD) will be naturally refrigerated.
However, putting something as complex as a data center on the Moon remains a huge technical challenge. The hard environment, maintenance difficulties and very high costs could make the project fail. There are also inherent risks associated with space launch, since there is no option to recover the equipment if something goes wrong. Lonestar has not yet published specific operational details or hardware specifications. And it will be interesting to know the company’s plans to overcome a critical section: communication between lunar and land facilities.
Just in case, the lunar data center will have a land support in a Flexential installation in Tampa, where the needs of customers who have signed up for the project, the state of Florida, the government of the island of Man or the artificial intelligence company Valkyrie.
As we said, the concept of data centers based on space is gaining ground and the moon is a short -term objective. Although there are still technical issues to overcome: “The idea of using the largest satellite on Earth as an anchor point is far enough so that we can have security (in communications)”explain those responsible for LASTAR, adding that the focus was put in disaster recovery and storage, and not in activities dependent on latency that could be improved later.
LASTAR is not the only company that plans to establish a lunar data center. Reuters reports that other companies are considering similar space facilities, including Lumen Orbit, which recently collection 11 million dollars for the project.
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