I was talking with Chris Stott of Lonestar and Sebastian Jean of Phison the other day and they were discussing placing data centers in lunar orbit, on the surface of the moon or in lava tubes on the moon.
The reasons commercial companies, governments and other organizations would be interested in doing this is that their data could be free from natural disaster, terrorists activities, war, and other earth based calamities.
Lunar data centers could be the ultimate Iron Mountain or DR solution. You’d backup your corporate data to their data centers on the moon and could restore from them whenever you needed to.
The question is can it be done technically, can it be done economically, and can it pass the regulatory hurdles to make it happen.
Lonestar’s CEO, Chris Stott says the regulatory hurdles are underestimated by many who haven’t done much in space but they believe they have all the authorizations they need to make it happen.
The technical hurdles abound however,
- Bandwidth up and down from lunar orbit/surface needs to be significant. Gbps and then some. It’s one thing to ship customer data in a ready to deploy data center storage solution but another to update that data over time. Most organizations create TB if not PB of data on a monthly if not weekly basis. All that data would need to be sent up to lunar data centers and written to storage there for every customer they have.
- Power and cooling seems to be a concern in the vacuum of space or on the lunar surface. Most space electronics is cooled by a form of liquid cooling which is known technology. And most of the power requirements in space are supplied (at least near earth orbit, via solar panels.
- Serviceability, in any massive data center today hardware is going down, software needs to be updated and operations and development are constantly tweaking what occurs. Yes you can build in fault tolerance, and redundancy and all the automatic code/firmware lifecycle management routines you want. But at some point, some person (or thing) has to go replace a server board, drive, or cable and doing that on the moon or in lunar orbit would require a humans and a space walk, or sophisticated robots that could operate there.
- Radiation, space is considered a hard radiation environment cosmic rays and other radiation sources are abundant and outside the earth’s magnetic field which shields us from much of this, the environment is extremely harsh. In the past this required RAD hardened electronics which typically were at least a decade behind if not 2 or 3 decades behind leading edge technologies.
- Data sovereignty regimens require that some data not be transferred across national boundaries. How this relates to space is the question.
As for bandwidth, it all depends on how much spectrum one can make use of, the more spectrum you license, the higher transfer speeds to/from the moon you can support. And there’s also the potential for optical (read laser) communications at least from point to point in space and maybe from space to earth’s surface that can boost bandwidth.
NASA’s tested optical links from the moon and from ISS. They seem to work very well going from space to Earth, but not so well in the other direction – go figure. Lonestar has licensed sufficient radio frequency bandwidth to support Gbps up and down transfer speeds.
Lonestar says cooling is free in space. Liquid cooling is becoming more and more viable as GPUs and AI accelerators start consuming KW if not MW of power to do their thing. And the fact that space is at 2.7K degrees means that cooling shouldn’t be a problem as long as you can dissipate the heat via radiation. Convection doesn’t work so well without a medium to work in. And in the vacuum of space orbit and presumably on the moon’s surface, that means radiation is the only way to shed heat.
They also say that power is unlimited in space. That is as long as you can send up and deploy sufficient solar panels to sustain that power. Solar panels do deteriorate over time, so that might be a concern limiting the lifetime of these data centers. But presumably with enough solar panels that shouldn’t be critical path.
Can a data center today be run without servicing? Microsoft’s project Nattik experimented with undersea data centers (see our Undersea data center’s post). The main problem with these is that they were dumping heat into local ecosystems and for some reason fish and other sea life didn’t like it. Microsoft has since abandoned undersea data centers. But they did prove they could be run for years without any need for servicing.
Historically electronics sent to space or the moon have all been RAD hardened. Which necessitated using older and more expensive versions of electronics. Not sure but I read once that today’s cell phone has more computing power than NASA had in 1969.
But, lately there’s been a keen interest in using state of the art, commercial off the shelf electronics. Lonestar said the Mars Helicopter was run off what essentially was an Android phone’s CPU.
The key to the use of COTS electronics in space is the newer forms of radiation shielding that’s available today. Nonetheless, the radiation environment in lunar orbit and on the moon surface or in lunar lava tubes is not that well known. So one of Lonestar’s experimental payloads is to monitor the radiation environment from earth launch to moon surface in much greater detail than what’s been available before.
As for data sovereignty in space, it’s apparently solved. Multi-nation payloads are often deployed from the same space craft. Space law states that any nation’s payload is the responsibility of that nation. So technically, each data regimen could be isolated within their own data center equipment and not have to intermix with other nation’s data/storage. Yes they would all share in the power, cooling, and communications links but that’s apparently not an issue and encryption could keep the communication links data secure, if desired.
So whether you can place a data center in lunar orbit, on lunar surface or in lunar lava tubes is all being investigated by Lonestar and their technical partners like Phison.
Can it be done at a price that customers on the earth would pay is another question. But apparently Lonestar already has customers signed up.
Are datacenters in lunar orbit or on the moon, any more resilient or available than data centers on earth.
Yes there’s no wildfires on the moon, no hurricanes, no earthquakes, no floods, etc.. But there’s bound to be other lunar based dangers. Solar storms and moon dust come to mind. And the environment inside lunar lava tubes are a complete unknown.
And of course anything attached with communications links are also susceptible to cyber threats whether on Earth or in space.
And man made threats, in lunar orbit or on the surface of the moon are not out of the question. Yes it’s highly unlikely today and the foreseeable future, but then anti-sat weapons were considered unlikely early on.
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Speaking of man made threats, apparently, China already has a data center in lunar orbit or on the surface of the moon.
Comments?
Photo Credit(s):
- From Giancarlo Foto4U | Flickr, Moon
- By NASA (Crew of Skylab 4), wikipidia
- From Microsoft Project Nattik Phase 2
- From Microsoft Project Nattik Phase 2
