Lonestar Data Holdings, a Florida-based firm, launched last week a shoebox device that carried data, including from Vint Cerf, internet pioneer, and Florida’s government, aboard Intuitive Machines Athena Lander. The company’s device will land on the moon this week and be the first one to test a recent question on technologists’ mind: Is it time to shift data centers away from Earth?
Data centers that consume a lot of energy are popping up everywhere. They consume land and water, stress our electricity grids, emit noise, and strain the power grid. Building data centers in orbit, on the moon or nearby could help alleviate many of these problems.
Steve Eisele is the president and chief revenue office of Lonestar. He believes that storing data on the moon would be a great idea. Eisele explains that the moon is the best option for storing data backups. It’s much harder to hack, and it is harder to penetrate. The moon has no problems on Earth – not even natural disasters or power outages.
Lonestar’s device has eight terabytes, which is about the same as high-end laptops. The device will only last a few weeks, before the lunar night falls, temperatures drop, and solar energy runs out. The company believes that this will be sufficient time for testing practicalities such as downloading and uploading of data, and verifying the secure data transfer protocol.
It has even bigger plans. The company wants to start a data storage service as early as 2027. It will use a group of satellites that are placed at the Earth-moon Lagrange Point L1, which is a gravitationally stabile point located 61.350 km above the surface of the moon. The spacecraft will have an uninterrupted view of Earth, allowing continuous access to data.
Similar aspirations are shared by other companies. Axiom Space, a US-based company best known for arranging short trips for private astronauts to the International Space Station, plans to send a prototype to the station within the next few months. The firm wants to install a computer node on its space station module by 2027.
Starcloud is a Washington-based company that also bets on the necessity of processing data in space. This company has raised more than $11 million in December, and even more since, to build a data-crunching small satellite equipped with Nvidia graphics processors.
Axiom believes that the need for space computing goes beyond providing untouchable data backups. The growing fleet of Earth and space-observing Satellites are struggling with bandwidth restrictions. Images must first be sent to the ground station, scattered all over the world, and then to the data center for processing. This causes delays before users are able to gain any insight from satellite observations.
Jason Aspiotis is the Global Director of In-Space Data and Security at Axiom. The time between seeing an issue and taking action can be crucial for both national security as well as some scientific applications. “A computer in the space could also reduce costs by reducing the need to transport all data down to earth.”
For these data centres to be successful, they need to be able to survive harsh conditions in the space and draw enough solar power to run. They also have to make sense economically. The challenges may seem daunting, but they are actually more manageable than you might think.
Why not better in space?
Concerns about computing infrastructure’s impact on the environment are growing due to recent growth in AI, crypto-mining and other technologies. Data centers consume around 1% to 2% of all electricity in the world. According to a Goldman Sachs study published in 2013, this number may double just by 2030.
Some space-tech enthusiasts think that orbiting data centres could be the solution.
Damien Dumestier is a space system architect for the European aerospace conglomerate Thales Alenia Space. They also generate a great deal of heat so water is needed to cool them. In space you don’t have to worry about any of this because you are able to use solar energy and radiate heat in the space.
Dumestier also believes that space is a safer option for the storage and transportation of data than Earth. Undersea fibre-optic cable systems are susceptible to natural disasters and sabotage, such as the volcanic eruption under the sea that disconnected Tonga from the internet for two weeks.
Data centers located high above the Earth and connected by unhackable links will be harder to penetrate or cutoff. These computing superhubs are virtually untouchable, barring antisatellite weapons, nuke explosions in space, or robot interceptors. This is true, with the exception of micrometeorites, space debris and other space-based explosions, which can be avoided and to a certain extent engineered for.
The electronic equipment will also be subjected to the energetic particles of the sun outside the Earth’s protective atmospheric layer, and this could cause damage over time. Axiom will tackle this problem using military-grade equipment that Aspiotis claims can survive extreme conditions. Lonestar believes it can avoid harsh radiation by placing data centers under the surface of the moon in lava tubes.
There is also the issue of how to power these facilities. Solar power is available in Earth orbit and it is always free. However, the amount needed to power Earth-scale data infrastructure has never been achieved.
Thales Alenia Space’s ASCEND study (which stands for “advanced cloud computing for European net-zero emission and data sovereignty”) envisions data platforms orbiting in space twice the size of the International Space Station – the biggest space structure ever built. Solar arrays would power the server racks that are the core of ASCEND, producing enough energy to run 500 Western homes. Solar panels installed on the ISS, by comparison, produce about a quarter of that power – 240 kilowatts when fully illuminated.
The launch costs and environmental impacts of rocket launches also complicate things. Dumestier believes that for space-based data centres to have a positive environmental impact, rocket flight carbon emissions must be reduced. Dumestier says that SpaceX’s Starship is an important step forward, as it is able to launch large amounts of data and could also be more cost-effective and efficient per kilogram.
Aspiotis shares these views. “Data centers will be as cost-effective in space as on earth in a not too distant future,” he states. In which case, do we prefer them to be on earth, where they consume power, water and other utilities including real estate?
Domenico Vicinanza tempers optimism at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. According to him, moving large data centers into space is still something of a long shot. The robotic technologies needed to assemble, maintain and repair such massive structures are not available yet. Hardware failures would also increase the cost of maintenance in an orbital environment.
Fixing orbital problems is not easy. “Even with robots and automation there are limitations to what can remotely be repaired,” Vicinanza states. Solar flares, cosmic radiation and other harmful elements could harm electronic devices and electronics. This includes microchips, memory and even current technology that is not designed and tested for space.
He adds that collisions with other spacecraft could increase the amount of debris in Earth’s orbit. He says that any damage caused to the data centre could lead to cascading space debris and complicate orbital operations.
Even if data centers are not moved off Earth, some supporters claim that we’ll still need this technology to increase our presence in outer space.
Eisele states that “the lunar economy is growing and we’ll need digital infrastructure in the next five to ten years.” We will have robots who will be able to communicate with each other. The governments will establish scientific bases, and they will require digital infrastructure in order to meet their requirements not just on the Moon but also Mars. This will play a major role in our future.
