| Lonestar, a technology startup, plans to build data centers on the Moon. To test the concept, Lonestar plans to send the first equipment as part of the Intuitive Machines IM-2 lunar mission, which is scheduled for December 2022. According to the company’s plan, the lunar data center will provide edge computing for future missions, as well as backup and disaster recovery services. The startup claims that the Moon is the “perfect place” to provide premium storage services. The company has already received venture capital investments and even applied to the International Telecommunication Union to use the radio frequency spectrum on the Moon. Among the partners of the startup are the Californian company Skycorp Inc., which specializes in orbital logistics, and Canonical, known primarily as the creator of Ubuntu.  NASA plans to return to manned missions to the Moon from 2025 under the Artemis program and has already started developing the IT infrastructure. In addition to participating in NASA projects, Lonestar Holdings also has plans to commercialize its developments. The startup, for example, used servers on the International Space Station (ISS) to issue non-fungible tokens (NFTs). In the second half of the year, Lonestar plans to send a software “virtual payload” to the Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission and then send equipment to the Moon as part of the IM-2 mission. We are talking about a server and a storage module the size of a book, powered by solar energy. The hardware will be built by Skycorp using multi-core RISC-V processors. Source |