Who knows, maybe one day such a major disaster will take place here on earth that we will lose a lot of our data in one fell swoop. That should not happen, says an American company.

Last year we wrote about plans to store seeds, spores, sperm and eggs of 6.7 million species in tunnels beneath the moon’s surface. The American company Lonestar wants to do something similar, but with important data.

“I find it incomprehensible that we only keep our most precious possessions – our knowledge and data – here on Earth,” said Chris Stott, CEO of Lonestar, opposite UK IT site The Register† “We need to secure them in a place far away from here.” So the moon.

Two Landers

For the first steps, Lonestar hooked up with another company: Intuitive Machines† That has been taken up by NASA to bring cargo to the moon with its own lander, Nova-C. At the end of this year it should leave for the moon – with, among other things, a small bit of data from Lonestar on board.

In 2023, a second Nova-C lander is set to go to the moon’s south pole. He should have a device of about a kilogram with 16 terabytes of data from Lonestar on it.

Then tests will have to take place in which data in the form of radio radiation is sent from the earth to the device on the moon, and vice versa. Lonestar has already received permission to do this, reports The Register†

Hundreds of meters wide corridors

If all goes according to plan, Lonestar hopes to send a server with 5 petabytes (5,000 terabytes) of data to the moon by 2024. Two years later, a server with 50 petabytes should follow. By then, Stott says, it will hopefully also be possible to send data from Earth to the Moon at a rate of 15 gigabits per second. (For comparison: currently in the Netherlands a download speed of 100 megabit per second quite common.)

But data centers on the moon is not the ultimate goal. Stott eventually wants to put them in the network of lava tunnels under the moon’s surface: a system of corridors that can be hundreds of meters wide. There the temperature is more constant and the servers are exposed to less dangerous radiation.

Crashing Landers

It is not clear how seriously the latter part of the plan was thought through. On the still rather brief Lonestar’s website can’t find anything about it. But hey, maybe they’re thinking there too: first things first† Landings on the moon tend to fail. In April 2019, the Israeli lander Beresheet crashed, in September of the same year the Indian Vikram suffered the same fate. So it remains to be seen whether the landers with Lonestar’s first data on board will soon succeed in reaching the lunar surface without chunks.