A rocket was just fired into space containing the first data center to land on the moon, which is both incredible and incredibly corporate in equal measure

When your data is just too precious for this world, look to the moon for a safe space to store it. Yep, that big rock with very little atmosphere, pock-holed by craters, and a perpetual ‘bad side’. This is where Lonestar, a data center company, is eyeing up for hosting its next super-safe storage service. This isn’t just another wild idea, either. The company just teamed up with Phison and SpaceX to launched a payload on a Falcon 9 rocket that’s somewhere between Florida and the lunar surface as you read this.

The ‘Freedom Mission’ is intended to prove the technical know-how and capability to actually put some sort of storage on the moon. The reason? Well, there’s a lot of business jargon involved, but Phison says it’s something to do with providing an “additional layer of fortitude against natural disasters and unpredictable impacts to crucial data.” Though, if you ask me, the idea of the Earth being wiped out and only a hard drive full of client shipping data being all that’s left of humankind feels like proof enough that we ‘had it coming’.

The SSD in question is one of Phison’s Pascari enterprise-grade options, which has been tested to ensure it can withstand the slightly bumpy ride as it is launched faster than the speed of sound at the big rock in the sky. It’s expected to reach the surface by March 4—in one piece, ideally.

“Phison worked closely beside Lonestar to provide a Pascari enterprise-grade storage solution pressure-tested to withstand cosmic radiation, harsh temperature variation, vibrations and disturbances from lunar launches and landings,” the company says.

It’s a great bit of advertisement for Phison. Its competitors can say ‘Hey, we’ve built an SSD that can withstand a drop of 5 metres’ and in response it can say, ‘Our SSD has been to the bloody moon’, or probably something a bit more professional than that.

The SSD contains a “number of storage and edge processing customers” but no one is mentioned by name. We know what was on the previous Lonestar mission to the moon, though, and it shouldn’t be that surprising to you.

This isn’t the first mission to prove data centers on moon is a go-er. Lonestar has previously launched the Independence Mission, which blasted the US Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights to the moon for a bit of a laugh. They did manage to transmit and receive data from this mission though, which is a pretty big step in the right direction.

Lonestar’s goal is to offer “space-based data services” and includes (more jargon incoming) Recovery and Resiliency as a Service (RaaS) premium data backup services on the moon, which I have to admit is the most boring sounding reason to go to space I’ve ever heard. This was not what I thought the age of commercial space transportation would entail, but I should’ve known better after they filled the Earth’s orbit with what’s basically a fancy Wi-Fi extender.

I jest, this is very cool and very impressive. What’s even cooler is that the data center within the payload for the Freedom Mission is 3D-printed and designed to “reflect the silhouettes of NASA Astronauts Charlie Duke (Apollo Moonwalker) and Nicole Stott (Space Station Space Walker) in tribute to the Artemis campaign”. This little flourish is great—it shows there’s still plenty of romance and awe in corporate space missions, after all.

All of which attaches to Intuitive Machine’s NOVA C Lunar Lander, which is what it’s attached to in the image a bit further up.

Oh, and while the future of this mission hangs in the balance until March 4, the day when it’s supposed lands on the moon, Lonestar says it’s already sold all of the capacity for the next mission. No room for my Devil May Cry fanfiction then? Darn.

You can watch the rocket containing this mission blasting off from this SpaceX live stream below.

You know what else was on this rocket? A payload from Nokia set to demonstrate 4G connectivity on the moon.

Yeah, it sounds like that might be the most boring space mission yet, but as it turns out it’s a pretty neat solution for the lunar surface. Altogether, pretty cool stuff.