News Phison and Lonestar launched cornerstone of lunar data center into space last night — lands on the moon in early March

[Admin]

Phison has collaborated with Lonestar Data Holdings to launch and establish a data center on the moon.

Phison and Lonestar launched cornerstone of lunar data center into space last night — lands on the moon in early March : Read more

 

[husker]

Meghan Moriarty from the WESH Channel 2 news report: "Think of it as a giant flash drive built to back up the U.S.'s data in another universe."

I wasn't aware that our Moon was in another universe. I wasn't even aware we could travel to other universes.

 

[bit_user]

If the premise of this is to serve as an off-planet repository of data from Earth, that's pretty dumb. NAND flash is not an archival storage medium. This thing needs to be continually powered to retain its data for any great stretch of time and I'm sure it'll fry for one reason or another in no more than a couple decades. Furthermore, sending it to the moon obviously comes at ludicrous expense. I'm sure there are much better and safer places/ways to back up your data on earth.

IMO, the use case for a lunar data center would be as a data relay and cache, for probes and other lunar infrastructure. If that's not their eventual goal, then I consider it just a dumb publicity stunt.

Not to mention: what are you going to do if somebody hacks into and then bricks the thing? Like I said, power loss or breaking the firmware badly enough could lead to data loss before anyone can get up there to service it, if they don't just erase your data directly. Heh, this could turn into the most expensive-ever ransomware attack!

 

[bit_user]

I wasn't aware that our Moon was in another universe. I wasn't even aware we could travel to other universes.

Wait, there's another universe?? Where?

 

[Notton]

I assume it's textbook sized to prevent cosmic ray bit flips?
If so, why not a cube and increase the density further?

 

[bit_user]

I assume it's textbook sized to prevent cosmic ray bit flips?

Huh? How would that help? Sure, you don't want to spread everything out on a single large PCB, but the real way to deal with cosmic rays would be by burying the thing deep underground (or maybe placing at the bottom of a deep crater, lava tube, etc.). Except then, you have to deal with a separate solar array and running the power to it, not to mention a communications array located somewhere on the surface.

I think it's textbook-sized because every kg you land on the lunar surface is eye-wateringly expensive. Don't forget that, with no atmosphere to slow it down, you need to include enough propellant to bring it to a soft landing.

 

[Aaron Priest]

As usual, retrieving/restoring data will be more expensive than storing it. ;-)

 

[Notton]

Huh? How would that help? Sure, you don't want to spread everything out on a single large PCB, but the real way to deal with cosmic rays would be by burying the thing deep underground (or maybe placing at the bottom of a deep crater, lava tube, etc.). Except then, you have to deal with a separate solar array and running the power to it, not to mention a communications array located somewhere on the surface.

I think it's textbook-sized because every kg you land on the lunar surface is eye-wateringly expensive. Don't forget that, with no atmosphere to slow it down, you need to include enough propellant to bring it to a soft landing.

AFAIK, electronics can be shielded against cosmic ray bit flip at the component level and with additional insulation material.

 

[bit_user]

AFAIK, electronics can be shielded against cosmic ray bit flip at the component level and with additional insulation material.

You can't shield against gamma rays with just a bit of sheet metal, or else they wouldn't be an issue. That's why I said the stuff about burying this deep underground.

Satellites work pretty well with error-correcting techniques and fault-tolerance, but they're also seen as disposable and have a limited service life. I'd hazard a guess their electronics are generally "just enough" to do the job. It's very different, when you're shipping trillions of bits so they can just sit there and hopefully not decay.

Anyway, we'll see what comes of this. My guess is "not much". It's probably not more than just a gimmick, at least so far. Like I said, I can see a legit point in having some infrastructure for data caching & relay, but it's not clear to me if that's their eventual goal or if they're just going to sell "lunar data storage" to their more gullible wealthy customers.