Should we be moving data centers to space?

For Steve Eisele, Lonestar’s president and chief revenue officer, a big appeal of putting data storage on the moon is security. “Ultimately, the moon can be the safest option where you can have a backup for your data,” Eisele says. “It’s harder to hack; it’s way harder to penetrate; it’s above any issues on Earth, from natural disasters to power outages to war.”

Lonestar’s device is equipped with eight terabytes of storage, about as much as a high-end laptop. It will last for just a couple of weeks before lunar night descends, temperatures plummet, and solar power runs out. But the company expects that to be enough time to test practicalities like downloading and uploading data and verifying secure data transfer protocols.

And it has bigger plans. As early as 2027, the company aims to launch a commercial data storage service using a bunch of satellites placed in the Earth-moon Lagrange point L1, a gravitationally stable point 61,350 kilometers above the moon’s surface. There, the spacecraft would have a constant view of Earth to allow continuous data access.

Other companies have similar aspirations. The US space company Axiom, best known for organizing short trips to the International Space Station for private astronauts, intends to launch a prototype server to the station in the coming months. By 2027, the firm wants to set up a computing node in low Earth orbit aboard its own space station module. 

A company called Starcloud, based in Washington state, is also betting on the need to process data in space. The company, which raised an $11 million round in December and more since then, wants to launch a small data-crunching satellite fitted with Nvidia GPUs later this year. 

Axiom sees an urgent need for computing capacity in space beyond simply providing an untouchable backup for earthly data. Today’s growing fleets of Earth- and space-observing satellites struggle with bandwidth limitations. Before users can glean any insights from satellite observations, the images must be downlinked to ground stations sparsely scattered around the planet and sent over to data centers for processing, which leads to delays.

“Data centers in space will help expedite many use cases,” says Jason Aspiotis, the global director of in-space data and security at Axiom. “The time from seeing something to taking action is very, very important for national security and for some scientific applications as well. A computer in space would also save costs that you need to bring all the data to the ground.”

But for these data centers to succeed, they must be able to withstand harsh conditions in space, pull in enough solar energy to operate, and make economic sense. Enthusiasts say the challenges are more tractable than they might appear—especially if you take into account some of the issues with data centers on Earth.