This article comes to you from the Moon.

The story of how it got there is decades in the making, involving vast government research efforts in space exploration and lunar landing technology, a concerted private effort to reignite the Space Race, and the dreams of a small startup hoping to upend the data center industry.

This feature originally appeared in Issue 56 of the DCD Magazine. Read it for free today.

But first, a caveat: this feature was written in a mad dash, during one week in October 2023 to meet a payload certification deadline. It represents a time capsule of what we understood in that moment. [Editor’s note: Terrestrial updates from the year 2025 will be added in square brackets.]

If everything goes to plan, this article will be ferried to the lunar surface in February or March, following an earlier successful landing in November or December. It will then be stored there, and also transmitted back to Earth, before appearing on these pages.

The launch may have been delayed, it may have exploded at launch, in orbit, or on the surface of the Moon.

But, if you are reading this, it means that something has gone right.

[Things actually went slightly awry, with the launch delayed by a year to February 26, 2025.]

The precious things put forth by the Moon

The idea for Lonestar began in the early months of 2018. The NotPetya ransomware attack had caused more than $10 billion in damages, and a group of businesses were concerned about the future security of their data on an increasingly troubled planet. They approached Chris Stott, then CEO of satellite spectrum company ManSat, for advice.

“We looked at data centers underwater, in jungles, deserts, and under the mountains,” he recalled. “And everywhere we looked on the Earth we found data sovereignty issues and network issues.”

Maybe, just maybe, the answer lay off Earth, he thought, looking up at the Moon. But, before the newly-founded Lonestar could even begin to consider the technologically complex task of setting up off-planet Disaster Recovery as a Service, the company had to check whether it was legal.

“We took one of the most regulated of all human activities, and then we added more regulations, like data sovereignty, on top,” Stott said. Fortunately for the company, the lengthy history of satellite case law played to its advantage. The Moon is not sovereign, so any hosted payload simply acts as a mini-embassy of its host nation.

This, the company soon realized, meant that it could send data centers to the Moon, but still meet the data sovereignty requirements of companies on Earth.

A Danish business could back up its data on a whole different celestial body, and yet legally the data would still be in Denmark. Things get a little more complex when serious data processing occurs, but this is how it works for disaster recovery.

Its legal questions answered, Lonestar raised $5 million for its first step – a proof of concept. The startup signed a contract with lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines to go up on its first two missions.

By the time you read this, IM-1 and -2 should have both landed. If so, IM-1 would be the first non-governmental spacecraft to successfully land on the lunar surface, after an Israeli effort crashed in 2019 and a Japanese attempt smashed into the lunar ground in April 2023.

A dozen flight controllers at Intuitive Machines’ control center will have helped shepherd IM-1 on its roughly 384,400km (238,855 mi) journey. Three teams, Red, White, and Blue, will have worked eight-hour shifts from its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and through the mission’s surface operations, expected to last roughly two weeks. [The mission was a success, but the lander fell on its side, and could only operate for six days. The IM-2 ‘Athena’ lander design was tweaked following this incident. Rival Firefly managed to successfully land on the lunar surface on 2 March, 2025.]

“The idea of landing on the Moon is not something new to Intuitive Machines,” president and CEO Steve Altemus told DCD. “The core group that started Intuitive Machines in 2013 was part of NASA’s Human Spaceflight and Advanced Technology programs, including Project Morpheus.”

Project Morpheus was an autonomous lunar lander prototype that NASA developed in 2010, using a liquid methane and liquid oxygen engine design. Intuitive took the research further.

“We applied the decades of experience with NASA human spaceflight, Project Morpheus, and the commercial and government lunar missions that have come short of a soft landing,” Altemus said. “All of these things contribute to the probability of success in our first mission.”

Lonestar’s contribution to this initial mission will simply be in the software domain, building upon a December 2021 test on the International Space Station (ISS) with Canonical and Redwire.

“We put the world’s first software-defined data center in the space station and it ran fine on a 10-year-old computer running Windows 10,” Stott said proudly.

The company will transmit the US Declaration of Independence to the lander three times, one for each stage of the journey – once while it is in transit, once while it is in orbit, and once after it has landed. It will then send a copy back from the Moon to Earth.

It will also travel pre-loaded with the Magna Carta and data for the State of Florida. [These tests were all carried out successfully before the lander died.]

But it is on the second IM lander that Lonestar plans to touch down with a dedicated data center of its own.

The first data center on the Moon

The data center on which this article resides is not a large one. On Earth, it would not be considered a real data center – but, up here, it represents a small step to a potentially much larger future.

The Moon’s first data center is capable of storing 8TB on [Phison] SSDs, and has a single Microchip PolaFire SoC FPGA, running Ubuntu and Yocto. Lonestar’s partner Skycorp built the hardware and space-tested similar equipment on the ISS, separately to the Lonestar software trial.

“What Skycorp has been able to do and prove out on the ISS is that our hardware degrades at about the same rate as it would on Earth,” company CEO and retired Air Force general Steve Kwast said.

This small deployment on the lunar South Pole will survive on a proportionally small power envelope. The Nova-C lander generates around 200W across all payloads during transit and on the lunar surface, using a mixture of solar power and batteries.

The lunar data center will also have limited connectivity, with “100 kilobits for the entire mission uplink,” Stott said. “That’s for us to send commands to our data center payload.”

Sending data back from the Moon, “we get a megabit per second uplink at certain times of the day,” he said. “We have one gigabyte in total for the mission.”

A few kilobytes of that data ration will be used to send this article back down to Earth.

Intuitive Machines plans to deploy five Data Relay Satellites to provide greater connectivity for future missions, but Lonestar hopes to have outgrown Intuitive’s landers by then.

For now, the data center is just this small deployment, encased in a 3D-printed shell created by design firm Big.

[On 6 March, IM-2’s Athena lander successfully touched down on the lunar surface, but again fell on its side, causing a premature end to missions. This article was beamed home from Earth orbit, lunar transit, and lunar orbit, with this version of the feature the one sent from the Moon’s orbit. The feature was not able to leave the lander on the Moon itself. The article is, however, on the lunar surface.]

[The Lonestar mission managed to operate on the Moon, as the only payload that was able to run, with the team managing to upload data to the system and get back telemetry.]

A quick note to future lunar explorers: If you look closely, you’ll see the shell is wavy and casts a shadow.

When the light hits it in the lunar morning, you will see the face of a man – Brigadier General Charles Duke, retired NASA astronaut, Apollo 16 Moonwalker, and CapCom for Apollo 11.

When the rays of the afternoon sun grace it, you will see the face of a woman – Nicole Stott, retired NASA astronaut, spacewalker, and Chris Stott’s wife.

“I could not think of a more perfect pair to represent past, present, and future,” the Lonestar CEO said.

Goodbye Moon

This data center is dying. Soon, it will be permanently powered down, and this article will remain frozen in solid state until radiation and cold wipe it from existence in the years to come.

But that’s okay. This was expected. The lander was built to last just 21 Earth days – seven in transit and one lunar day on the surface (that’s 14 Earth days). In the coming long lunar night, there will be no more power for its solar panels, and the cold will kill its critical systems. [With the lander falling over, this death came faster.]

Future data centers, should they come, will be more permanent, Stott said.

That means developing facilities capable of withstanding the harsh realities of the Moon.

Surviving the lunar night

On the surface, conditions are unforgiving.

“You’re going to be landing in one of the coldest parts, but it’s not the coldest part,” lunar scientist Dr. Charles Shearer said. “Those are the permanently shadowed regions, which are -418°F (-250°C).”

IM-2 will only be subjected to 208°F (-130°C), by which point the mission will have ended. During the mission, conditions will be milder – it’ll face temperatures of 140°F (60°C), much lower than the 250°F (120°C) that can be found further north.

With the lander originally planned to touch down closer to the equator, before NASA moved it, Stott said the data center was built to handle external temperatures of 482°F (250°C).

Depending on where you land, you face different challenges. “Equatorial landing locations are less susceptible to local lighting and shadowing effects,” Dr. Tim Crain, Intuitive’s CTO and co-founder, said.

“At the poles, a slight variation in local terrain can provide deep shadowing at the landing site that our models might not predict. Equatorial landing locations are subject to extreme peak heating with an ‘overhead’ solar illumination and reflected surface lighting.”

There’s a small layer of gases around the Moon known as an exosphere, which cannot hold much heat. Unlike our atmosphere, which helps maintain a level of temperature across day and night, the swing in temperature is sudden and harsh – something longer-term projects will have to prepare for.

There’s also the radiation.

“Some of it is relatively low energy and fairly constant, and that’s just the solar wind particles,” Dr. Shearer said. “Any material on the surface of the Moon is going to be influenced by that.”

Occasionally, there are solar flares, which can be really detrimental to humans and electronics – it’s very deadly,” he said.

“And then, with regard to your mission, there are micro-meteorites that impact manmade objects on the surface. The odds of them hitting some structure or facility may be on the order of one or two per year.”

These are tiny, and will likely only cause minor surface damage. Larger meteorites are possible (just look at the Moon’s craters), although less common.

The bigger risk is not from larger rocks crashing down, but instead from something much smaller: lunar dust. “The lunar surface is coated with what’s called a regolith – I was actually looking at some yesterday – and it can be 45-100 microns, so that’s a really fine grain,” Dr. Shearer said. “It can be fairly glassy and very, very sharp, so it can abrade things pretty quickly.”

Making matters worse, regolith also has “a low electrical conductivity and therefore accumulates charges. It could be detrimental if you have a circuit board that gets dust on it.”

Towers on the Moon

In areas of shadow, which include potentially resource-rich craters (also known as cold traps), it will be too dark for landers. But there are those here still trying to catch the sun.

“In certain areas on the surface, you are power-starved,” Matthew Mahlin, a researcher at NASA’s Structural Mechanics and Concepts Branch, said.

His team is working on a potential solution: The Tall Lunar Tower. Essentially, the idea is for autonomously assembled towers to stretch over 50m into the dark lunar sky. From the top, solar panels will unfurl, catching rays that would otherwise be lost.

Mahlin analyzed the ‘Connecting Ridge,’ next to the Shackleton Crater, which is a potential Artemis III landing region. If solar panels were put at ground level, they would eke out just a few Earth days of light every lunar cycle. “At 30-50 meters, you see that go up significantly,” he said.

The height also brings the solar panels above the Moon’s layer of dust particles, at least according to current research. “Exactly how high they go is something that needs more study,” Mahlin said, “but most research shows that the particle density is not very high after a few meters.” The towers are expected to operate for at least 10-15 years.

Each tower is designed to provide 50-100kW, which is what’s needed by the expected lunar payload. “We’re pushing for the fixed infrastructure that can create the power generation capability to support things like data centers or a lunar base camp,” Mahlin said.

“Similarly, they could be used for any industrial processes on the Moon, such as refining lunar regolith, or capturing the volatiles in these cold traps in the permanently shadowed regions of the Moon.”

At around 100kg, these towers are much lighter and cheaper to get to space than batteries. They also offer an opportunity for dual-use.

“I think putting a communications payload on them is going to be one of the first things we do,” Mahlin said. “We’ve had a lot of interest – it’s like putting a satellite on the top of a stick, it can be self-contained up there.

Power is but one part of the challenge of the Moon. There’s also the matter of warmth, considering the plunging night temperatures.

Nuclear winter warmer

Startup Zeno Power has its own dual-use technology that it hopes can offer both power and heat: nuclear batteries.

“Historically, NASA has always used an isotope called plutonium-238, which is a terrific isotope, but an isotope that has to be specifically developed for these uses. This means that there is not enough to meet the growing demand for power on the lunar surface,” CEO Tyler Bernstein explained.

Zeno Power instead turned to the much more available strontium-90, essentially a nuclear waste product with a half-life of 28 years, for its Radioisotope Power Systems.

“With the Intuitive mission, they intend for the lander to survive for 14 days during the lunar day, and then freeze to death during the winter night,” Bernstein said. “So NASA is paying $77 million, alongside the commercial payloads [like Lonestar], for it to last 14 days.

“What we can do is provide heat and power that allows these payloads not only to survive but to operate during the lunar night, increasing the lifetime of these landers and payloads from 14 days to five plus years.”

While the Radioisotope Power System is comparatively heavy, Bernstein believes that the extended life it gives a mission makes it worthwhile.

For now, the devices are relatively low-power. “We’re looking at watts,” Bernstein said. “At the moment, we’re not at the point of powering massive data centers. Our ambition is to get to the kilowatt-scale of electricity, but not megawatts.”

Beyond that, large nuclear reactors make more sense. NASA’s Fission Surface Power program has teamed up with the Department of Energy to test a 10kW-class system to operate on the Moon by the late 2020s, with a goal of eventually reaching megawatts.

Alongside the power, both reactors and decaying isotope systems like Zeno Power’s offer the benefit of heat. “Yes, electronics want electricity to operate,” Bernstein said. “But, more importantly, they want to stay warm, so that they don’t freeze to death.

“India’s lander only lasted for 14 days – what killed it was a lack of heat. You can use electricity to generate heat, or you can just use nuclear material that is naturally decaying and producing it.”

Going underground

In the long term, Lonestar hopes to avoid many of the challenges posed on the surface by nestling safely in lunar lava tubes, giant underground caverns formed during the eruption of basaltic lava flows.

“We want to get down into those lava tubes,” Stott said. “It’s a perfect place to put batteries, too.”

One of the tubes the company is evaluating is 93 kilometers long, 80 meters deep, and a kilometer wide. “You could put three Manhattans in there,” he said.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Nüchter, of the University of Würzburg, also sees safety down below: “I always say that the first humans on Earth also lived in caves, before technology advanced so that we didn’t need to.

“The whole idea is to use these lava tubes to provide shelter from all the evil things that are out there – radiation is blocked to a certain degree, and temperatures are a microclimate.”

There is still much to learn about the structure of these tubes, and several research efforts plan to venture forth into the unknown darkness. “If you’re going into a natural structure, there’s still a fear that you don’t have a clue what its stability is,” Dr. Shearer said.

Nüchter, a professor of robotics, was part of the European Space Agency (ESA)’s DAEDALUS project – which evaluated the possibility of lowering a spherical robot from a crane into the tube’s depths.

“We came to the conclusion that it was technically feasible,” Nüchter said. “We proposed it having cameras and LiDAR sensors to see as much as possible. Everybody would be pretty happy if it saw rocks covered in ice.”

The LiDAR proposed by the team would use different frequencies, each of which reacts differently to materials based on their reflectivity properties. “If, let’s say, the stone is covered in water, then you can detect this,” he explained. “Because if you use an infrared light that is absorbed by water, you will get nothing back. But if you use a green light, it has little difficulty penetrating.”

Combining the data from the different frequencies would allow researchers to build a map not just of the shape of the lava tube, but of its properties.

A follow-up project, co-funded by ESA, is currently underway to see whether it would be possible to add stick-like linear actuators to allow the robot to move itself.

The system would potentially leave behind signal repeaters and even charging stations, allowing it to travel deeper into the vast tunnels.

NASA is considering its own lunar lava tube expedition with robots, but both projects remain years away.

More immediately, this article has an inquisitive fellow traveler on the IM-2 lander: Micro-Nova, a small, cuboid robot that plans to fly into the opening of a lava tube and take photographs of what it sees.

“Can you imagine flying into a cave or crater on the Moon with a camera, reporting that data back to Earth, and saying, ‘here’s what the inside of the Moon looks like?’ Those insights are what we’re building with Micro-Nova,” Intuitive’s Dr. Crain said.

“Micro-Nova is essentially a drone that has its own propulsion, its own navigation sensors that can detach from Nova-C and fly in a kind of hopping arch, which is fuel-optimal if it needs to achieve maximum distance from the lander. It can also fly very prescribed fixed altitude trajectories for the collection of scientific data with a common reference.”

[Again, Micro-Nova was rendered interoperable by the faulty landing.]

The sky is not the limit

Alongside its plans to go underground, Lonestar hopes to deploy some facilities to orbit the Moon by 2026.

Its lunar orbiting satellites will boast storage in the petabytes, as well as provide a connectivity option for lunar facilities. “We expect the orbiters to last at least five to seven years,” Stott said. “If we do it well, it should be seven to ten.”

He sees the satellites as a stepping stone to the surface, as they are much easier to deploy without requiring a lander or governmental help. “We can run to our own schedule, we’re not waiting on NASA, and we can get past the day-night cycle.”

That, of course, begs the question: why not stay in space? Why go through all the added trouble of landing on the surface? The answer, Stott said, is scale. Underground is where he, one day, hopes to operate large data centers with significant storage capacity.

“They will also be perpetual, because we’ll be able to go up and change out old equipment if it breaks,” he said. “We can use robots to do that.”

The company is not the only one to view the cold expanse of space as fertile ground for a computing revolution.

“We do not plan to replace the terrestrial data center, but supplement it with Edge computing in space,” said Koichiro Matsufuji, co-CEO of Space Compass, a joint effort by satellite operator SKY Perfect JSAT and digital infrastructure giant NTT.

The company plans to launch geostationary orbit (GEO) Optical Data Relay satellites from 2025 and Edge ones from 2026. “We are still studying what kind of Edge computing capability we can provide,” Matsufuji said.

For the first phase, power will again be constrained. “There are probably tens of watts of power available for the compute, but in the future we plan to expand the capability as we increase the volume of satellites,” he said.

The company sees these satellites less as a way to process terrestrial applications, and more as a waypoint for other satellites. Earth observation satellites, for example, could send data to the space Edge for unnecessary images of clouds to be filtered out.

“It’s not only the processing but also the low latency download capability,” Matsufuji said, with the satellites using optical and RF dual connection with proposed speeds of up to 20Gbps. “That combination can provide a value that is very significant, we think around $50m a year.”

Separately, Space Compass is part of a project led by Mitsui & Co. to study what should go into the successor to the ISS’s Japanese Experiment Module. Space Compass will look at the optical communication potential, as well as a data center deployment inside the new station.

It’s still early days, but Matsufuji noted that the project is different from the GEO satellite computing service “because the ISS has more space to accommodate big computers.”

The dream among the stars

The goal at Lonestar is to deploy data centers in orbit around the Moon, on its surface, and under the ground. Stott has a vision of how large this could grow that some would call ambitious, but others would see as a case of lunar lunacy.

“Out of the exabyte a day that humanity creates, 63 percent is regulated,” Stott claimed. “That’s our market; we’ll just keep expanding and expanding because we can never meet demand.”

The idea of immutable data stacks able to meet terrestrial regulation is one that could appeal to numerous businesses willing to pay the premium. As the drives on the Moon get older, and business-critical data gets transferred to newer, denser SSDs, Stott hopes to offer consumers cheaper storage on the older gear, through a new business line called ‘Selene.’

“Why don’t we just store it somewhere else, just in case?” he said. “Because of the space program, we can do it in a cost-effective way – I know it sounds outlandish, but why not? Data can be off-planet, but in-country.”

The company is in the midst of securing another round of investment. It’s not likely to ever raise enough money to run an independent space program, but that’s fine. It doesn’t have to do this on its own.

“We’re building on 60 years of investment in space exploration and Silicon Valley, and are building a team drawn from the very best of the data center and satellite industries,” Stott said. “All to launch a whole new industry – creating a revolutionary solution to a global data problem.”

Key to any chance of success is the continued decline in the cost of getting matter into space. Intuitive CTO Dr. Crain explained: “The reduced cost of space launches makes a great deal of space commerce possible because the necessary capital investment of the launch is less of a barrier to innovation and new approaches to providing space services and development.”

It cost about $54,500 to launch a kilogram into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) on NASA’s space shuttle, before its cancellation in 2011. SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which began supplying the ISS in 2012, brought that down to around $1,500-2,500. If its Starship mega-rocket proves successful, that could drop as low as $100.

That’s a big if. Elon Musk’s rocket company has pulled off miracles in the past, but developing the world’s most powerful rocket has proved unsurprisingly challenging. Tests have so far ended explosively, and it’s hard to give any reliable timeline for when commercial launches will begin – and how quickly prices will come down. [Starship has since achieved several milestones, but is still exploding. Its latest test failed this May, with another due in July.]

“We have a letter of intent from SpaceX for the use of Starships to take 100,000 kilograms every single time, so then we can get to the exabyte and yottabyte level,” Stott said. This is a bold claim, with a yottabyte of storage representing more than what is currently on Earth.

Alongside the rocket advances, Lonestar will require significant leaps in lunar robotics technology. “We have talked to Astrobotic about leasing their equipment,” he said. “You’ve got NASA, ESA, the Japanese Space Agency, and the Canadians all already paying people to build the robots. They’re coming.”

The coming wave

Lonestar may be joined by other data centers on the Moon over the coming decade.

A 2021 patent by the Shanghai Aerospace System Engineering Institute lays out an idea for a lunar data center “soaked in insulating heat-conducting oil.” Shanghai Aerospace was responsible for developing the Chang’e 3 rover (from 2013-15), as well as other lunar technology.

China has been, by far, the most successful lunar explorer of the modern Space Race.

2019’s Chang’e 4 was the first lander in the world to touch down softly on the far side of the Moon, with data beamed back via the communication relay satellite Queqiao. A year later, Chang’e 5 successfully collected and returned lunar samples. Chang’e 6 plans to do the same, except this time from the far side of the Moon, in 2024.

“We understand they’re going out to their One Belt One Road clients saying ‘the world’s about to get very horrible, we will store your data for you on the Moon,’” Stott claimed. “It’s a weird market confirmation of our business.”

Italian space agency ASI, meanwhile, has contracted Thales Alenia Space to study the feasibility of a lunar data center – but this is intended as a resource to serve manned and unmanned lunar missions of the future, rather than remote storage for Earth-based organizations.

“Relying on Earth-based computational resources is simply not acceptable,” Eleonora Zeminiani, the head of the aerospace company’s Human Exploration New Initiatives division, told DCD in 2021.

“Communications with Earth are subject to a [noticeable] latency, one order of magnitude bigger than what we consider acceptable for today’s VoIP standards and two orders of magnitude bigger than the desired standard for low-latency applications such as virtual machines and network storage,” she said.

Another, previously unreported, patent hints at the possibility of a competitor of considerable scale: Amazon. Way back in 2018, the cloud giant quietly filed a patent for a satellite-based content delivery network (CDN) in an extraterrestrial environment.

Diagrams show “a space-based data center on the Moon” connecting to a wider network. Amazon has since begun launching Internet-providing satellites through Project Kuiper, which could eventually grow to a constellation of 3,236 satellites in LEO.

They do not currently have much on-board compute or storage, and are primarily focused on connectivity.

[Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin also plans a space data center, while rival billionaire Eric Schmidt said that he bought rocket company Relativity Space for orbital data centers.]

Connecting our largest satellite

Connectivity is also beginning to come to the lunar surface.

As well as carrying this data center and our story, the IM-2 mission will test the Moon’s first mobile communications network, provided by Nokia under NASA’s Tipping Point program.

Around the same time as this feature is being beamed back to Earth, a small rover will have begun to leave the lander. It will demonstrate Nokia’s lunar 4G deployment – a network that will also serve the Micro-Nova hopper we met earlier. [The mission detailed here did not happen, although it did manage to send some data back from the lunar surface before it died.]

“The mission will essentially have two driving paths,” Nokia Bell Labs VP and head of the project Thierry Klein told us. “First, the rover is going to circle around the lander at a roughly 300-meter radius, and that’s just to get good coverage measurements.

“After that, we’ll drive off in the direction of the Shackleton Ridge for about two kilometers.”

The signal could go further, with tests estimating around 4.5km. But, with the Lunar Outpost rover having to stop and recharge occasionally, that’s as far as the robot is expected to travel before darkness comes. During their brief life, the rover and hopper will send back images of the Moon, transmitted over a 4G network, and then back home.

The project was first trialed at a facility in Colorado, whose volcanic terrain is somewhat akin to the Moon’s surface, and the short-range test showed speeds “north of 75-80 megabits per second.” That drops as the rover gets further away, but is still significantly greater than the Moon-to-Earth link it shares with Lonestar on the lander.

Nokia also put the system through 25 tests across shock, vibration, acceleration, temperature, humidity, vacuum, radiation, and more. “We made some modifications, but they were relatively minor – we came out pretty good on that first cycle,” Klein said.

The telco deployment was, however, only built for the mission at hand. It will suffer the same fate when the night comes, so was not designed with those conditions in mind. “That’s what we’re studying now,” Klein said. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to go into how to survive the night, especially radiation hardening. The equipment in the Tipping Point program is not what you would deploy for a five-year mission.”

A big question is where these 4G and 5G antennae would live on the Moon. “If this is mounted on the outside of a tower, then we’ll need to take care of the thermal factors, but if it’s mounted inside or in a thermally-controlled cabinet, then we don’t.”

Klein is confident, however, that a solution is achievable: “From a comms perspective, we’re not so worried, we’re having conversations with the chip providers about radiation hardening now.”

For the last year, alongside this immediate project, “Nokia has been focused quite a bit on the longer-term capabilities of lunar cellular technologies and how it fits into architectures that they may be thinking about for the Artemis program.”

This, and future projects, are expected to feed into LunaNet, NASA’s plan to develop a network of cooperating networks akin to the terrestrial Internet.

Earlier efforts to send landers and rovers to the Moon have treated every mission as a standalone event, with each system requiring its own direct connection back to Earth. That requires heavy, expensive, and power-hungry equipment on every system – and a direct line of sight to the Earth.

David Israel, NASA exploration and space communications projects division architect, hopes to change this all with LunaNet. The idea is to create a unified framework that governments and industry can share, so that telco towers like Nokia’s can connect to satellites, ground stations, lasers, and everything else.

“When you travel to a town you’ve never been to before, your phone knows what time it is, where you are, and can access all the information in the world,” Israel said. “There’s multiple applications running and all these different data connections to different places, all going on at the same time.”

That’s something we take for granted on Earth, but is currently lacking on the lunar surface, as there’s no agreed framework for everyone to talk to each other.

LunaNet relies on Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN), a store-and-forward protocol for dealing with the fact that connecting nodes could be moving satellites and may pop in and out of existence.

“The interesting issue here is to distinguish between local lunar surface communication and communication back to Earth,” Vint Cerf, one of the developers of DTN and one of the creators of the Internet, told DCD in 2021.

“If the installations that need to communicate back to Earth are on the side of the Moon that is facing us all the time, you almost don’t need a relay capability, except locally,” he said. “If it’s on the other side, that’s a whole other story. Now we need orbiting spacecraft to pick up a signal and hang onto it and then transmit when it gets back to the other side where it can see the Earth.”

He added: “The two things that drive my interest in the LunaNet are the configurations where we end up with something on the side where we can’t use direct communication to Earth. And the other one might be local communication where the radio signals are obscured.”

Israel concurred, noting that any network will require local compute and storage to be a success. “Even on the side facing the Earth, there can be bandwidth constraints alongside the latency ones,” he said.

“If there’s a network on the Moon that has a higher speed and connectivity, then you wouldn’t have those bandwidth limitations – and that’s where having some sort of compute power on the Moon would start to have benefits.”

After years of negotiations and work, LunaNet has finally reached the procurement stage. By the time this article is live, industry partners will likely have been chosen, and contracts will be in place. [Procurement is still ongoing.]

Also contributing to LunaNet is ESA, through its Project Moonlight program. “This is significant,” Israel said, “both Moonlight and LunaNet are using the same interoperability specifications in their procurement – the idea is that no single company or agency will have to provide all of the communications and navigation infrastructure for things on the Moon.”

Project Moonlight is Europe’s own effort to begin the process of digitizing the Moon.

“Moonlight consists of two steps,” Bernhard Hufenbach, head of ESA’s strategic planning office in the Directorate of Human Spaceflight and Operations, said. “The first one is Lunar Pathfinder, this is an ongoing project, where we try to put in place a data relay spacecraft.”

That craft, built by Surrey Satellite Technology, “has a low data rate as we’ll relay primarily science data back to us,” he said. Planned for 2026, data won’t be sent in real-time, and will rely on store-and-forward protocols.

“And then, based on this experience, we’re planning to build a more significant service, which includes high data rate communication, including potentially real-time communication,” Hufenbach said. “It will also provide a navigation service, which helps the asset on the Moon to get the timing and positioning signal,” similar to GPS and Galileo on Earth.

Ready by 2028 at the earliest, that second stage is expected to help support a variety of lunar applications. Not only will it connect to systems on the far side of the Moon, it will lower the cost of those on the closer side – their signals will only have to reach the satellites, rather than all the way to Earth.

“The pricing of the service should be such that it becomes economically more attractive to go through the relay,” Hufenbach said. “Plus, you may need less powerful antennae or transmitters, which are cheaper and use less power.”

So far, all lunar missions have operated without a GPS-like navigation system – possibly to their detriment. “Many of the recent lander failures could probably have been avoided if such a system was available. It’s a paradigm shift.

Even after it’s live, it will likely take a while for lunar explorers – robotic and human – to fully trust the positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) system, so they will likely still travel with all the excess local guidance and connectivity for a few more years.

“The first generation of this new system will still see very traditional lunar exploration activities,” Hufenbach said. After that, he hopes, demand will expand with more permanent lunar deployments.

That will, of course, require data centers. “If you have future scientific infrastructure creating huge amounts of data, like radio telescopes, for example, it would make sense for there to be data centers on the Moon,” he said. “Same for human bases, you can also do some processing on the Moon.”

Hufenbach added: “I believe data centers on the Moon could be one of the more industry-driven interests. It would be interesting to have a secure data service there.”

A lunar colony

Beyond just connectivity, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) hopes to foster a wider gamut of infrastructure and commercial applications on the Moon.

Through its recently launched LunA-10 program, DARPA is working with industry partners (including Klein’s team at Nokia) to understand what it takes to build a community on the Moon.

“The hope is that, as we get this commercial economy started, we can start thinking about the whole idea of interoperability – I build power, you build comms,” DARPA program manager Dr. Michael ‘Orbit’ Nayak (Maj, USAF) said. “And we’ll just make them work together.”

In a previous role, Orbit deployed on the Earth’s South Pole. “One day, I had to go dig a bunch of six-foot holes in the snow,” he recalled. “And that sounds very silly, but we were looking for a power line that was key to my experiment.”

He mentioned the challenge to others at the South Pole Station who represented different nations. “They all came together to help – the environment brought us together across different countries, there’s very much this international environment of collaboration.”

LunA-10 is centered around bringing that collaboration to the Moon. “We’re aiming to define a framework whereby there are many services on the Moon, and I don’t need to bring everything I need to survive with me, I can just plug into it.”

The project, which will be nearing completion by the time you read this, will look at both the risks presented by trying to develop a lunar community, and how to solve them over the next ten years.

A number of different sectors will be evaluated, including power, communications, and positioning. That means looking at data centers on the Moon, and how much compute should be local or just moved back to the Earth. “I don’t know the answer to that question yet,” Orbit said. “I think nobody does. That’s really what I’m hoping to get out of this study.”

Another unknown that DARPA is hoping to answer is whether it’s possible to design a single laser system that can provide optical power beaming, laser communications, and PNT over optical communications all at the same time.

“I think it’s quite feasible from a technology perspective,” Orbit said. “What I don’t know is if it’s feasible in a 10-year horizon.”

Once it has worked out what is likely possible, DARPA will then help research and fund the key components and missions that will allow lunar communities to flourish.

Chris Stott’s wife Nicole spent some 103 days in space across two missions. The second lasted just two weeks. “It just wasn’t long enough, they had to pull my clawing hands off of the hatch to get me back into the shuttle to come home – it’s such a special place,” she said.

But, Nicole added, “while the adventure side of space is awesome – I highly recommend it, don’t get me wrong – the most important fact is that everything we’re doing there, whether it’s the technology, the hardware, the people, the relationships, or all of this science, ultimately, is about improving life on Earth.

“I think that the things we could do in space that we haven’t done yet could solve some of the greatest challenges we have.”

All of the proposed infrastructure will contribute to NASA’s wider Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the Moon no earlier than 2025 or 2026, and eventually build an enduring lunar base. [Artemis is behind schedule, and its future under President Trump is unclear. One-time right-hand man Elon Musk has called the Moon a “distraction,” and called for NASA to go straight for Mars. NASA faces dramatic cuts that may make it struggle to function.]

For Dr. Shearer, who earlier described many of the complex and brutal challenges of life on the lunar surface, the problems are not insurmountable. “I have worked with NASA for many, many years – and this is the most optimistic I’ve been in terms of getting humans on the Moon and developing a space economy.”

Only time will tell what shape exactly that economy will take. “Does that mean that there will be ice mines at Shoemaker Crater or Shackleton Crater, and that the South Pole of the Moon will become the hub of a flourishing multi-planetary civilization?” posed Oliver Morton, author of The Moon: A History for the Future. “No, I don’t think that necessarily follows at all.”

He noted that the environment is somewhat similar to Antarctica, “and although humans have been living there for many decades, it is not even remotely self-reliant. And I don’t think that a self-reliant Moon outpost is a particularly likely thing or a particularly necessary thing, but I think a scientifically useful Moon outpost is quite plausible.

“And there will be something different about looking at the Moon and knowing that there are people permanently on it.”

What we leave behind

Stott thinks about permanency often. We create reams of data, most of it at risk of being lost due to accident, malicious intent, or natural disaster.

Lonestar is primarily a commercial endeavor, and the reality is that the vast majority of the data it stores will only be of commercial value. “It’s not just about that,” Stott said. “We’ve gone off to a bunch of sustainable development goal charities and NGOs and said ‘we’ll do this for you for free.’”

Similarly to the Arctic World Archive, a film-based data center deep in a Svalbard mine that DCD visited in 2021, Stott views lunar deployments as a necessary backup for the world’s most important data.

“Our goal is global backup, global refresh, global restore, all from the Moon. Lonestar will save Earth’s data one byte at a time.”

This all may fail. For all the years of research, the might of nations and mega-corporations, space remains frighteningly difficult. Much of the lunar surface and what lies beneath it still needs to be explored and studied.

Lonestar may fail after this landing. It may become a footnote in history, with this article just a footnote to that footnote. Statistically, the history of space exploration suggests that failure is a likely outcome.

But, with the Earth wracked by climate disaster and geopolitical strife, the idea that at least some of what we have created could survive us presents a tantalizing prospect.

When you go to space, there’s a phrase for the feeling you get when you see our pale blue dot below – the Overview Effect.

“I felt how fragile our planet is,” former NASA astronaut and Lonestar advisor José Hernández told DCD. “You look at the thickness of the atmosphere from space, and it’s so thin – it’s scary.

“In one fell swoop, I could see the whole view of the world. We have to be good stewards of our planet, and have to be very careful with what we have.”

—- End Transmission —-