Big Data Heads to the Moon
For most people in IT, “the edge” conjures images of small computers housed in retail outlets, hospitals, or maybe an oil rig. But the word takes on an entirely new meaning for Lonestar Data Holdings, which today took a big step in sending the first petabyte-scale edge data device to the moon, hopefully paving the way for a commercial business storing data for disaster recovery (DR) purposes.
SpaceX today successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and it’s currently on the way to the moon. The primary payload is a NASA-funded lander that will run science experiments, but one of its secondary payloads is what Lonestar Data Holdings says will be “the first data center hardware on the moon.”
Lonestar Data Holdings is hitching a ride on Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 NOVA-C lander, dubbed Athena. After separating from the Falcon 9 rocket, IM-2 will take five days to traverse cis lunar space, arriving at the moon on March 3.