Data storage and resilience company Lonestar and semiconductor and storage company Phison launched a data center infrastructure on a SpaceX rocket on Wednesday that’s headed to the moon.
The companies are sending Phison’s Pascari storage — solid state drives (SSDs) built for data centers —packed with Lonestar’s clients’ data on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set to land on March 4. This marks the beginning of a lunar data center, the first ever, that the companies plan to expand in the future until it holds a petabyte of storage.
Chris Stott, the founder, chair, and CEO of Lonestar, told TechCrunch that the idea to build a data center in space originated back in 2018 — years before the current AI-driven surge in data center demand. He said customers were seeking ways to store their data off Earth so it would be immune from things like climate disasters and hacking.
“Humanity’s most precious item, outside of us, is data,” Stott said. “They see data as the new oil. I’d say it’s more precious than that.”
Stott said partnering with Phison to build a space data center was a natural choice. Phison already provides storage solutions for space missions through NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars. The company also offers a design service called Imagine Plus, which develops custom storage solutions for unique projects.
“We were very excited when there’s a call from Chris,” Michael Wu, the general manager and president of Phison, told TechCrunch. “We took a standard product and were able to customize whatever they need for these products and we launched it. So it’s a very exciting journey.”
Lonestar partnered with Phison in 2021, and since then, they have been developing SSD storage units designed for space. Stott added that the companies spent years testing the product before their first launch because the tech has to be rock solid — it can’t easily be fixed if an issue arises.
“[This is] why SSDs are so important,” Stott said. “No moving parts. It’s remarkable technology that’s allowing us to do what we’re doing for these governments and hopefully almost every government in the world as we go forward and almost every company and corporation.”
Stott said the tech has been launch-ready since 2023 and the company successfully conducted a test launch in early 2024.
Wednesday’s launch included various types of customer data, ranging from multiple governments interested in disaster recovery to a space agency testing a large language model. Even the band Imagine Dragons participated, sending a music video for one of their songs from the Starfield space game soundtrack.
Lonestar isn’t the only company looking to bring data centers into space. Another contender, Lumen Orbit, emerged from Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch. The startup garnered one of buzziest seed rounds from that YC cohort, raising more than $21 million and rebranding as Starcloud.
As AI-driven demand for hardware accelerates, it’s likely we’ll see more companies pursue space-based storage solutions, which offer nearly infinite storage capacity and solar energy, advantages that Earth-bound data centers can’t match.
For Lonestar, if all goes well, the company plans to collaborate with satellite manufacturer Sidus Space to build six data storage spacecraft that the company expects to launch between 2027 and 2030.
“It’s fascinating to see the level of professionalism, it is tremendous,” Stott said. “This isn’t 60 years ago with the Apollo program. Apollo flight computers, they had 2 kilobytes of RAM and they had 36 kilobytes of storage. Here we are on this mission, flying 1 Gigabyte of RAM and 8 terabytes of storage with Phison Pascari. It’s tremendous.”
