Put a data center on the moon?
178 comments
·February 26, 2025M95D
mppm
They've got it all figured out, you just don't understand. Basically, the plan is:
1. Put data on the moon
2. ???
3. Profit
For more info, check out their promotional video: https://www.lonestarlunar.com/video
uberman
This is as big a scam or waste as those solar mirror people. Throwing a USB stick out the lunar rover window and calling it a data center. Data centers usually do stuff other than sit in the dust.
Feel free to invest though, perhaps if you feel good about discarding hard drives on the moon I could interest you in space mirrors and for a low low price I'll lease you the spot where your harddrive lands for 100 years.
dylan604
> Throwing a USB stick out the lunar rover window and calling it a data center. Data centers usually do stuff other than sit in the dust.
Okay, so here me out: the ultimate cold storage for someone like Iron Mountain. You'd have to understand that you'll need a minimum of 96 hours for retrieval time, and it's gonna be expensive to get that retrieval rocket there and back. Or, build a big dish and send the data via satellite signals.
motorest
> They've got it all figured out, you just don't understand.
I'd love to know how they plan to offset the cost of moving every single nut and bolt to the moon with... Cheaper cooling?
I mean, Microsoft experimented with sinking data centers under the ocean. That's certainly cheaper and more performant than shooting a rocket to the moon. That experiment ended. Why?
connicpu
Iirc a big issue they had was the fact it's nearly impossible to service the interior once you sink it down. That would basically get an order of magnitude worse with it on the dark side of the moon.
lelandfe
Digital, yeah? Digital, right? Hey, rocket! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuTSAeFhdZU
foxyv
A 1 meter square heat exchanger in a vacuum at 20C will emit about 1 kilowatt at -173C. So about as much as a small space heater per small panel. So a 1 megawatt datacenter would need about 300,000m^2 or 0.3 km^2 of surface area to cool it.
But geothermal cooling would be great on the moon too. Run a pipe 2 meters under the lunar surface and it is -21C.
I think the whole idea though is to make a low wattage space-stead so you can store copies of Moana out of reach of Disney cease and desist letters.
lmm
> geothermal cooling would be great on the moon
Surely it's selenthermal cooling at that point.
foxyv
Thank you for the correction. Shows my geocentric thinking.
solid_fuel
> But geothermal cooling would be great on the moon too. Run a pipe 2 meters under the lunar surface and it is -21C.
Isn't the moon geologically dead though - no water or geological movements?
I worry this would just result in the ground absorbing the waste heat and eventually becoming too warm to effectively cool anything. Especially because the ground itself would eventually still be limited by the rate of radiative cooling into space, right?
szvsw
You have to worry about changing the ground temperature even on earth FYI. When designing district heating/cooling systems with borehole fields, one of the things that you check for is to make sure that you don’t inject too much heat (or extract too much) seasonally - ideally it’s roughly balanced so any drift year over year is small.
Obviously things like the diffusivity (so conductivity, mass, density etc) of the ground matter a lot, as does the rate of heat exchange at the surface for it to reject (or absorb) heat to the environment.
foxyv
Geological activity is usually a problem for geothermal cooling. Conductivity of lunar subsurface is your main problem. Generally what makes geothermal really effective is the monstrous thermal mass of solid and liquid material compared to air as well as it's much higher conductivity. While that is true on Earth, on the Moon things are very different.
The problem isn't so much geological activity or lack thereof, as the nature of lunar regolith. Lunar regolith has a conductivity of 0.004W/mK. That is lower than aerogel! So unless the subsurface has a much higher conductivity, using subsurface cooling would be doomed.
Edit: Lunar Regolith is only the first 4-5 meters of the lunar surface.
null
robocat
> Run a pipe 2 meters under the lunar surface and it is -21C.
I would expect the regolith to be a poor thermal conductor. Not useful for heat exchanger
LeifCarrotson
Probably orders of magnitude better than hard vacuum, though.
eru
> But geothermal cooling would be great on the moon too. Run a pipe 2 meters under the lunar surface and it is -21C.
It won't stay -21C for very long, if you pump heat into it.
Really, radiative cooling is your only longer term option.
Btw, you can make your radiative cooling a lot more efficient than you gave in your example, if you run it at a higher temperature. Radiated power grows with the fourth power of (absolute) temperature. So, run your chips at something closer to eg 100C and you radiate more than 2.5x as much power.
foxyv
> It won't stay -21C for very long, if you pump heat into it.
You are right, and also it would require digging which is a lot harder than laying out panels on the surface. Back of the napkin it's a tossup depending on the conductivity of lunar sub-surface material and how much pipe you lay. Just like on Earth.
> Btw, you can make your radiative cooling a lot more efficient than you gave in your example
This is true too, heat pumps could even get higher radiator temps than 100C if you like.
RajT88
Putting a data center on the moon is not the real business.
The real business is the fake contracting companies the founders own who will hoover up all the contracts, do a lot of on-paper contracting making the founders very wealthy before the fake lunar business goes bankrupt.
grandempire
Unfortunate that this is how pessimistic a startup forum is, but it’s no fault of yours and I don’t think you’re wrong.
motorest
> Unfortunate that this is how pessimistic a startup forum is (...)
It's a startup forum. People commenting here have real world experience with startups. Might they not be commenting on what they see and know?
JoeAltmaier
Conduction through the ground? Or run coolant through buried pipes. Just a pump; no significant energy to cool, just move the coolant.
ok_dad
Just ship all that heavy coolant up there first
ceejayoz
You'd probably use lunar water from the ice that's believed to be in shadowed craters at the poles.
Frenchgeek
What's the expected lifetime of the average hard-drive in a datacenter? And does Amazon allow next day delivery to the Moon?
Valgrim
You could probably use significantly less coolant if you're using heat pipes. The coolant is mainly gaseous and only a small mass remains liquid during the cycle
M95D
... and digging/drilling equipment.
xattt
Why not do the same on Earth?
For all the heroics needed to establish this ok the moon, the efforts and costs are much less back home.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
There's a serious lack of terraforming here on Earth.
Oh, we're overpopulated? Buy some single-family homes, buy out the government, and upzone it into apartments. You're still cheaper than space flight and with a shorter commute to work than Rapture
JoeAltmaier
Right; its a one-and-quarter-second to the moon. High data center latency.
trhway
> If there's no air, then only black body radiation can be used to cool the data center.
to put it into numbers - at 80C (353K) 1m2 radiates 880Watts
I think though that instead of the Moon we'll be putting data centers into orbit - for 1KWt GPU we'll need 5m2 solar panels and 1m2 radiator - all together under 10kg, ie. $1000 at Starship prices while the GPU itself is $20K+ .
The kicker here is that the Starship launch price is cheaper than installing solar on the ground ( $2K/KWt and higher)
M95D
I wonder if this info came from the Intuitive Machines or from article editor?
I can't find anything related to cooling on Intuitive Machines website. BTW, the website looks like investor bait, not a real company that has a future.
arp242
It came from:
"Amit Verma, a professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University Kingsville who is not affiliated with the project, says there may be technical advantages to hosting data on the moon as well. Some parts of the moon are permanently shadowed and therefore extremely cold, as low as -173 °C. This means that no energy or water would need to be expended to cool the data center. And the electrical components will perform more efficiently."
I'm guessing Verma only thought about the electrical aspects, and simply didn't think about the different atmospheric conditions (i.e. not having one) as that's outside of the conditions an electrical engineer typically deals with. I can see how someone can make such a "oops, didn't think of that" mistake when a journalist asks for a comment.
null
dekhn
I agree (problem for satellites), but then I wondered if you could dissipate the heat into the ground in a large area.
perihelions
Isn't moon sand a very high thermal insulator?
edit:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission")
Comparing against reference tables, it's more insulating than rock wool insulation,
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...
dekhn
There's a reason I state my dumb ideas out loud :)
IndrekR
Rockwool is much better thermal insulator in vacuum as well…
Animats
"According to the United Nations’ 1967 outer space treaty, space and the moon are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty,” and as such poses a loophole for data sovereignty laws."
That will probably work about as well as the proposal to put a data center on Sealand [1]. Or Cryptoland. Or Satoshi Island. Or Blueseed.[2]
Or the Space Kingdom of Asgardia, which launched a successful satellite with some data storage in 2017.[3] That lasted until 2022, when the satellite re-entered.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
paxys
Whether countries have jurisdiction over the moon or not is irrelevant, because countries do have jurisdiction over the person or corporation that will run the lunar data center.
eru
> [...] because countries do have jurisdiction over the person or corporation that will run the lunar data center.
The people who originally sent the thing up, can give up their access.
As long as you don't have to physically touch the thing again, you can use some clever cryptography, so that no one is technically running it.
That's easiest, if you just let no one have any privileged access. But you can use (public key) cryptography or similar to give some anonymous people on earth access. Or, for peek publicity value, the data centre can give access to whoever holds a specific bitcoin.
vrighter
"use some clever cryptography"
And who will hold the keys?
tzs
It might have a better chance that those ocean-based proposals.
There are a lot of countries with navies that could just happen to decide to conduct a live fire training exercise in the general area as your ocean facility and just happen to have an accident that takes you out, with enough plausible deniability that they probably would not get in any serious trouble over it.
There are a much fewer number of countries that could take out a lunar facility and I don't think any could do it in a way that has any plausible deniability.
eru
> There are a lot of countries with navies that could just happen to decide to conduct a live fire training exercise in the general area as your ocean facility and just happen to have an accident that takes you out, with enough plausible deniability that they probably would not get in any serious trouble over it.
Why would countries not already do the same thing to commit high seas piracy today?
bawolff
> There are a much fewer number of countries that could take out a lunar facility and I don't think any could do it in a way that has any plausible deniability.
Sure, but if the goal is to get around copyright law, i think the usa would be very happy to do it. No plausable deniability needed.
tonyhart7
"1967 outer space treaty, space and the moon are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty"
because no country on earth can utilize full space venture (yet), do you think this treaty will hold if lets say US decide that they would colonize the moon for a start because no one would be able to do anything
rbanffy
A small boat with a police officer would be enough to invade Sealand. The Moon would be a bit more problematic.
SketchySeaBeast
Some of these arguments seem weird. Like yes, it's very cold, but it also has no atmosphere, so it's very hard to bleed the heat away.
Is the fact that the moon isn't protected from radiation and covered in impact craters not indicative of its poor suitability?
barbarr
Nope you're wrong. Lonestar has this all figured out. They even have a landing page and dramatic promo video, which is a clear sign of how much due diligence they put in after receiving their oversubscribed $5M seed investment.
nickpeterson
Only one man would dare give him the raspberries.
beardyw
"lunacy"
Middle English: from Old French lunatique, from late Latin lunaticus, from Latin luna ‘moon’ (from the belief that changes of the moon caused intermittent insanity).
abe94
I'd hope the writer or editor used lunacy for this reason haha
codetrotter
They did.
And now the title on HN has been edited down to remove this most exquisite pun :'(
perihelions
The editor flew too close to the sun and got their title clipped :(
Havoc
Very weird pitch. There are datacenters in nuclear bunkers and all the major providers let you do redundant copies across continents.
So what exactly is the threat model here? Astroid pulverises earth but moon somehow stays ok?
>it’s impossible to accommodate all potential customers in any one location, except in outer space
Extra territorial jurisdiction is a thing so don't think outer space treaty on sovereignty will help. Could just as well put it on the antarctic and that works better on cooling too.
It's cool as an experiment ofc but doesn't seem to make any sense.
9cb14c1ec0
Exactly. It doesn't solve data sovereignty in a practical way for anything other than backups, and even that could be debated. At the end of the day, everyone still wants low-latency access to their data.
paranoidrobot
> It doesn't solve data sovereignty in a practical way for anything other than backups
In my experience, customers who have specific requirements about data sovereignty are also explicitly including backups in those requirements.
femiagbabiaka
> Over 100 countries worldwide have laws that restrict where certain data can be processed and stored, often to within that country itself. As a data center provider, it’s impossible to accommodate all potential customers in any one location, except in outer space. According to the United Nations’ 1967 outer space treaty, space and the moon are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty,” and as such poses a loophole for data sovereignty laws. An American satellite is under American law, but it can carry a black box inside it that’s under British law, or any other country’s. A moon-based data center can host as many separate black boxes as needed, to accommodate all of its diverse customers. Governments seem particularly interested in this prospect.
Setting feasibility aside, seems strictly like this is privacy for the entities that deserve it the least. Privacy is for the individual and their "owned" data, not for governments to craft digital black sites.
softfalcon
We can barely tolerate the latency and throughput limitations between Europe and the US for data center processing... and now we're okay with data being wirelessly transmitted (read: super slow) from Earth to the Moon?
Building something on the moon would be cool, but a data center? Unlikely.
smitelli
> super slow
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2022-12-14
3753 units, 113 prefixes, 120 nonlinear units
You have: (2 * 238854 mi) / c
You want: ms
* 2564.4291
/ 0.00038995034
jedberg
The moon doesn't make a ton of sense, but Antarctica sure does. It's cold, it's dry, and if you load it up with GPUs, the latency is not a huge problem because you'd mostly be using it for training runs. And it's still on Earth, so you can connect it with an undersea cable.
Biggest issue would be power. Not sure what the geothermal situation is there, but given that they get most of their power from diesel, it's probably not great. You could build a big solar array, but then you can only use it for 1/3 of the year.
eru
The moon would make more sense for solar.
Btw, instead of Antarctica, you could put your data centre in Iceland (with more or less the same pros, but fewer cons). And: people are actually doing that!
jedberg
Iceland has a great geothermal power story, but the air is not nearly as cold. The reason Antarctica is good is because you would just blow outside air into the datacenter, no chillers required.
eru
Yes, Iceland is a bit warmer than Antarctica. But cooling is still relatively easy: Iceland only gets to about 14C in summer days. Round it up, and say it's definitely below 30C.
If you run your computers at about 60C, that's still plenty of difference.
You can also look into dumping your heat into water. Either ocean or freshwater.
duskwuff
I'm surprised that, somehow, the article barely even touches upon the question of bandwidth. Terrestrial data centers often have hundreds of gigabits per second of transit - how much bandwidth would be available to this lunar data center, to what endpoint, and how reliable will that be? (Would one of these permanently shadowed areas of the moon even have line-of-sight to the Earth's surface, or would it have to be relayed through a satellite?)
solid_fuel
The transit is even worse than that, right? The moon orbits the earth so at different times of day it is over different parts of the earth's surface. So the route is not only constantly changing, but sometimes you have to go around the entire earth (either via satellite relay or fiber) and then cover the distance from the earth to the moon on top of that.
It's hard to imagine any scenario where this proposal really makes sense.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Finally, the killer app for QUIC's network-switching feature
hollasch
If you have a problem that requires and hour or a day to compute, then spending fifteen minutes for data transfer up and down (particularly in the face of lowered costs) is often a profitable trade. Movie studio render farms are a classic example of such compute jobs. Weather or geological resource prediction could be another. There are many such high-compute jobs in practice.
daedrdev
They are also probably a minute fraction of jobs though.
duskwuff
Not only are those jobs relatively rare, but they also require a lot of hardware and a lot of power. Both of those are going to be in short supply. (Solar power requires sunlight, and the target locations are deliberately in shadow.)
zamalek
> “When you place data centers in environments that are already very, very cold...the performance actually also improves significantly,” Verma says. “Because when you go down in temperature, things like electrical resistance also go down.”
Oh, yes yes yes. Until it stops working entirely, that is. Some resistance is part of the design. Ask any LN2 overclocker.
hugs
Any former Googlers here from long ago also mildly surprised this wasn't an announcement from google?
Circa the "glory days" in 2007, "Google Moonbase" was the (90%? jokingly) go-to answer internally for the next crazy, ambitious project the company should work on. "Google Moonbase" was also the go-to answer when friends or family would ask what cool thing you're working on. Especially if you were working on actually secret projects like Chrome or Android at the time.
duxup
I wonder how many places on earth you can put things for the cost of putting it on the moon?
ben_w
At current prices, I think the moon is about as expensive as getting into Fort Knox by force.
Probably about as survivable, too.
Starship, if they solve the remaining issues before politics catches up with them, could solve the first problem.
I've seen some interesting ideas for contact-free drilling that might help with the second, but for now they're experimental* — we've got a lot of things in space tech that need R&D spending, which is a great opportunity on a forum like Hacker News, but does mean dreamers like me need to wait.
Johnny555
That's what I was thinking.
>Lonestar’s CEO Christopher Stott says it is to protect sensitive data from Earthly hazards.
If storing your data into 2 or 3 datacenters spread across the planet isn't safe enough from disaster, it's not clear that the moon will be any better since after a global disaster that destroys all copies of the data, it's likely that there will be no one left on earth that still needs or wants that data.
david_draco
Yes. Meteorites are being systematically collected to get impact statistics in areas that are tectonically undisturbed. They seem equally good places: Antarctica, Atacama desert, Greenland. In terms of bandwidth and maintainance they seem preferable to the moon. See the Arctic Code Vault in Svalbard.
EA-3167
If we're talking about the surface of the Earth (i.e. no clever "In the core" stuff) then... everywhere. And by surface lets say that we're talking about everything from the seafloor to the upper atmosphere.
It would probably be cheaper to put it in the caldera of an active volcano than on the Moon. You could certainly get a bathysphere full of archival tape to the bottom of the Challenger Deep for less than you could get the same on the Moon.
> Some parts of the moon are permanently shadowed and therefore extremely cold, as low as -173 °C. This means that no energy or water would need to be expended to cool the data center.
That doesn't sound right to me. If there's no air, then only black body radiation can be used to cool the data center. That means a massive radiator, a lot larger than a heat-to-air radiator+fan used on earth.