- Lonestar Data Holdings is preparing to launch its second lunar data center
- Flexential is its terrestrial partner for data transfer and launch operations
- War, climate change and other issues are driving governments to look beyond Earth to keep their data safe
Think of it as the ultimate air-gapped cloud environment for critical data. That’s how Lonestar Data holdings is pitching its new lunar data center offerings – and to hear CEO Chris Stott tell it, government and enterprise clients are eating it up.
“The demand we’re seeing is extraordinary,” Stott said in an interview with Fierce.
Founded in 2018, Lonestar launched its first successful mission (called Independence) for data storage and processing from the surface of the moon in February of last year in collaboration with the U.S. state of Florida. Now, it’s preparing to head back to the surface of the moon next month with its second mission, dubbed Freedom. Stott said six different government entities have booked space on the Freedom mission.
But the CEO said Lonestar has even more ambitious plans up its sleeve. Namely, it has contracted with Sidus Space to build six data center satellites that it plans to launch into the Moon’s orbit between now and 2030.
While its forthcoming Freedom data center can only hold terabytes of data, Stott said the first satellite – which it plans to send up into space in 2027 – will be able to store 15 petabytes worth of information. And that capacity will double with each subsequent satellite, he added.
And for its upcoming missions, Lonestar has tapped terrestrial data center player Flexential to serve as its gateway to the plant.
Why the moon
But hold on one second. Given the massive wave of data center construction that’s about to hit the globe, you may be wondering (as we did), why go to the moon?
Well, Lonestar is catering to one very particular use case: disaster recovery-as-a-service. Basically, it’s serving clients that need to ensure their data is untouchable and yet accessible when they need it most.
“There’s no perfect place to backup your data here on Earth,” Stott explained. He pointed to climate change, geopolitical concerns, wars, natural disasters and cyber threats as factors that are increasingly making terrestrial locations unsuitable for critical data storage. But from the moon, “we can do data sovereignty and we’re away from all the chaos.”
And as evidenced by the interest Lonestar has seen in its Freedom and planned satellite missions, the market is growing.
“The use case for this that we’re really seeing is that U.S. states appreciate the sovereignty aspect. Florida doesn’t want to go ask Montana for their data back,” Flexential’s Chief Innovation Officer Jason Carolan added. “The conversations are starting to get much more politically focused in many ways. So, I think each state is starting to think about ‘where is a safe place for me to go put this’…but each jurisdiction has some known or unknown challenges.”
According to Statista, the disaster recovery-as-a-service market is set to grow from around $15.5 billion in 2024 to nearly $36.7 billion in 2029, with the U.S., China, India, Germany and Japan leading revenue generation. Granted Statista didn’t look specifically at lunar solutions, but you get the point.
Plus, unlike on Earth, Stott noted power and cooling aren’t major issues in space. After all, there’s no shortage of ultracold air up there, and the sun just so happens to be an excellent source of energy.
“The hardest thing about getting to space is getting permission,” Stott said. No one owns the moon, per se, but access is governed via a United Nations treaty and company operations are governed by the laws of the nation from which they launch.
How it works
The Freedom mission will land on the moon and the data center equipment will find a home in one of the many tunnels that riddle the surface. Solar panels will supply power and line of sight communications will be used for transmissions back to earth. To that end, receiving dishes will be added to Flexential’s Tampa data center in Florida. According to Stott, the latency from the moon to Earth is about 1.4 seconds.
He added that payloads sent to Lonestar’s lunar data center facilities must be secured – it doesn’t accept any unencrypted data or executable code. And that latency is actually a boon for security, he added, since it can spot and mitigate any suspicious activity on its delay-tolerant network.
In terms of competition, Stott said there isn’t much right now. Sure, Amazon teamed with NASA to do edge processing from space and the likes of Axiom and Lumen Orbit are also working toward space-based data centers. But Stott said all of these are focused on low-earth orbit (LEO) deployments.
The real competition, he added, is actually a government: The People’s Republic of China.
For what it’s worth the moon seems to be a hub of activity these days. In addition to China’s efforts to establish a research station on the moon, telecom vendor Nokia is working with NASA to deploy lunar wireless connectivity. You can read more about the latter here.