Put a data center on the moon?
69 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.
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.
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 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.
null
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?
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.
JoeAltmaier
Right; its a one-and-quarter-second to the moon. High data center latency.
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.
__MatrixMan__
I don't think the use case requires much compute. It just has to hash the files maybe once per day and transmit:
> yes, the files are still here if you need them--well out of reach of pretty much everybody.
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.
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.
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.
cozzyd
not having an atmosphere also means way higher data corruption rate...
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.
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.
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.
ElijahLynn
Wait up, this lander is going up in the SpaceX rocket landing on the moon, staying there for 3 weeks, then coming back home? How?
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
debesyla
Until we make a really long USB-C cable.
...or, just, use the moon servers as an extreme form of backups only. Rarely used, used only for the essential data.
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.
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.)
nektro
aside from all the practical arguments listed out in other comments, i simply don't support corporations building in space. space should only be multi-national projects, similar to the way the ISS is managed
MrLeap
I can think of a bunch of great reasons to be wary about this, but at the same time it feels inevitable, doesn't it? Biggest reason I don't like it is the fact a big rock lobbed at earth from the moon is one of the lowest cost of entry WMD programs imaginable.
Seems like it's only a matter of time before someone deploys their capital to another space rock, convinces people to go with them, and then declares sovereignty of that rock. What comes with that is all the same stories history tells over and over, just again, on a different rock.
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.
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.