Lonestar, a data storage and fault tolerance company, and Phison, a semiconductor and storage company, launched a data center infrastructure on Wednesday on a SpaceX rocket bound for the moon.
The companies are sending Phison’s Pascari storage – solid-state drives (SSDs) designed for data centers – with Lonestar’s customer data on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that is set to land on March 4. This marks the start of the lunar data center, the first ever, which the companies plan to expand in the future until it reaches a petabyte of storage.
Chris Stott, founder, chairman, and CEO of Lonestar, told TechCrunch that the idea to build a data center in space came about in 2018, several years before the current surge in data center demand driven by artificial intelligence. According to him, customers were looking for ways to store their data off Earth so that it would be protected from things like climate disasters and hacker attacks.
“The most valuable thing that humanity has off the Earth is data,” Stott said. “They see data as the new oil. I would say it’s much more valuable.”
According to Stott, partnering with Phison to create the space data center was a natural choice. Phison already provides data storage solutions for space missions through NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars. The company also offers a design service called Imagine Plus, which develops customized storage solutions for unique projects.
“We were very excited when we got the call from Chris,” Michael Wu, CEO and president of Phison, told TechCrunch. “We took a standard product and were able to customize everything they needed for these products and we launched it. So it’s a very exciting journey.”
Lonestar partnered with Phison in 2021, and they have been developing SSDs designed for space ever since. Stott added that the companies spent years testing the product before it was first launched because the technology has to be reliable – it’s not easy to fix if there’s a problem.
“[That’s why] SSDs are so important,” Stott said. “There are no moving parts. It’s a great technology that allows us to do what we do for these governments and hopefully almost all governments in the world, and almost all companies and corporations.”
Stott said the technology has been ready to launch since 2023, and the company successfully conducted a test run in early 2024.
Wednesday’s launch included various types of customer data, from several governments interested in disaster recovery to a space agency testing a large speech model. Even the band Imagine Dragons participated, sending a video clip of one of their songs from the soundtrack of the space game Starfield.
Lonestar is not the only company that wants to put data centers in space. Another contender, Lumen Orbit, emerged from Y Combinator’s 2024 summer intake. The startup received one of the highest-profile seed rounds from this YC cohort, raising over $21 million and rebranding as Starcloud.
As the demand for AI-driven hardware accelerates, it’s likely that we’ll see more companies looking to space-based storage solutions that offer nearly infinite storage and solar power – advantages that ground-based data centers can’t match.
If all goes well, Lonestar plans to partner with satellite manufacturer Sidus Space to build six data storage spacecraft that the company plans to launch between 2027 and 2030.
“It’s fascinating to see the level of professionalism, it’s amazing,” Stott said. “This is not 60 years ago with the Apollo program. The Apollo flight computers had 2 kilobytes of RAM and 36 kilobytes of storage. And here we are on this mission, flying with 1 gigabyte of RAM and 8 terabytes of storage on a Phison Pascari. It’s amazing.”
