Put a data center on the moon?
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
That doesn't sound right to me. If there's no air, then only black body radiation can be used to cool the data center. That means a massive radiator, a lot larger than a heat-to-air radiator+fan used on earth.
edit:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9646997/ ("Thermophysical properties of the regolith on the lunar far side revealed by the in situ temperature probing of the Chang’E-4 mission")
Comparing against reference tables, it's more insulating than rock wool insulation,
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-d_42...
I agree with that. Just not for the heating/cooling reasons.
> Where will you get the immense energy needed to melt supercooled ice?!
The problem was too much heat. Now it's too little heat. You can't have both. The energy comes from the server farm. The coolant comes from the ice. You melt your first ice with the heat from the server farm (or an initial solar field).
For all the heroics needed to establish this ok the moon, the efforts and costs are much less back home.
Oh, we're overpopulated? Buy some single-family homes, buy out the government, and upzone it into apartments. You're still cheaper than space flight and with a shorter commute to work than Rapture
1. Put data on the moon
2. ???
3. Profit
For more info, check out their promotional video: https://www.lonestarlunar.com/video
Feel free to invest though, perhaps if you feel good about discarding hard drives on the moon I could interest you in space mirrors and for a low low price I'll lease you the spot where your harddrive lands for 100 years.
Okay, so here me out: the ultimate cold storage for someone like Iron Mountain. You'd have to understand that you'll need a minimum of 96 hours for retrieval time, and it's gonna be expensive to get that retrieval rocket there and back. Or, build a big dish and send the data via satellite signals.
You know what they say, 3-2-1 backup: three copies of your data, stored on two different types of media, with one copy kept offsite to guard against common-cause data loss. Depending on the cause, off-site could be a difficult place to go!
1) At the moment, we can't even get living people off the international space station let alone land on the moon and take off from the same spot twice.
2) If a space based proof of concept was practical, why would we not store our hard drive on the ISS. It is looking for some excuse to remain in operation and we can already come and go from it on a semi-regular basis?
3) If there was a global catastrophe to the extent that only moon based archives remained, then how are we going to go get them? This crisis destroys all data archives but preserves our space program?
4) Once we did get the drive back, what exactly might we do with it considering all other forms of data storage were destroyed?
5) If the data on the drive was so valuable that we were willing to pay millions of dollars for the chance that after Armageddon we could still get it back... Then why would the Chinese not just wait for us to place the drive then go get it themselves? Surely you would never encrypt it as the key would be just as vulnerable to loss as the data.
This is absolute garbage. It's not even close to being true. Since the astronauts arrived on the Boeing craft, SpaceX has delivered and retrieved other astronauts. They are not still on the ISS because there's no ability to bring humans back, but because of a scheduling logistics situation.
Continuing to push this scheduling snafu as being unable is just nonsense, and you are as well for pushing it.
> 2) If a space based proof of concept was practical, why would we not store our hard drive on the ISS. It is looking for some excuse to remain in operation and we can already come and go from it on a semi-regular basis?
There's only so much space on the ISS. Also, it's being decommissioned soon, so unless some company wants to take it over as a business--which NASA is open to yet no takers--they've contracted SpaceX to de-orbit the station.
We can't even get people back from the ISS in 96 days.
I'd love to know how they plan to offset the cost of moving every single nut and bolt to the moon with... Cheaper cooling?
I mean, Microsoft experimented with sinking data centers under the ocean. That's certainly cheaper and more performant than shooting a rocket to the moon. That experiment ended. Why?
I can't find anything related to cooling on Intuitive Machines website. BTW, the website looks like investor bait, not a real company that has a future.
"Amit Verma, a professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University Kingsville who is not affiliated with the project, says there may be technical advantages to hosting data on the moon as well. Some parts of the moon are permanently shadowed and therefore extremely cold, as low as -173 °C. This means that no energy or water would need to be expended to cool the data center. And the electrical components will perform more efficiently."
I'm guessing Verma only thought about the electrical aspects, and simply didn't think about the different atmospheric conditions (i.e. not having one) as that's outside of the conditions an electrical engineer typically deals with. I can see how someone can make such a "oops, didn't think of that" mistake when a journalist asks for a comment.
> yes, the files are still here if you need them--well out of reach of pretty much everybody.
But geothermal cooling would be great on the moon too. Run a pipe 2 meters under the lunar surface and it is -21C.
I think the whole idea though is to make a low wattage space-stead so you can store copies of Moana out of reach of Disney cease and desist letters.
Isn't the moon geologically dead though - no water or geological movements?
I worry this would just result in the ground absorbing the waste heat and eventually becoming too warm to effectively cool anything. Especially because the ground itself would eventually still be limited by the rate of radiative cooling into space, right?
Obviously things like the diffusivity (so conductivity, mass, density etc) of the ground matter a lot, as does the rate of heat exchange at the surface for it to reject (or absorb) heat to the environment.
The problem isn't so much geological activity or lack thereof, as the nature of lunar regolith. Lunar regolith has a conductivity of 0.004W/mK. That is lower than aerogel! So unless the subsurface has a much higher conductivity, using subsurface cooling would be doomed.
Edit: Lunar Regolith is only the first 4-5 meters of the lunar surface.
Surely it's selenthermal cooling at that point.
I would expect the regolith to be a poor thermal conductor. Not useful for heat exchanger
But for radiative cooling, vacuum with a clear view of the night sky is orders of magnitude better.
Although the regolith is only 4-5 meters thick, so you could probably just go under it and see what the subsurface is like with regards to conductivity.
It won't stay -21C for very long, if you pump heat into it.
Really, radiative cooling is your only longer term option.
Btw, you can make your radiative cooling a lot more efficient than you gave in your example, if you run it at a higher temperature. Radiated power grows with the fourth power of (absolute) temperature. So, run your chips at something closer to eg 100C and you radiate more than 2.5x as much power.
You are right, and also it would require digging which is a lot harder than laying out panels on the surface. Back of the napkin it's a tossup depending on the conductivity of lunar sub-surface material and how much pipe you lay. Just like on Earth.
> Btw, you can make your radiative cooling a lot more efficient than you gave in your example
This is true too, heat pumps could even get higher radiator temps than 100C if you like.
I'm not sure that actually works out to your advantage, because the heat pumps themselves produce extra heat. But I haven't done the math on that.
The real business is the fake contracting companies the founders own who will hoover up all the contracts, do a lot of on-paper contracting making the founders very wealthy before the fake lunar business goes bankrupt.
It's a startup forum. People commenting here have real world experience with startups. Might they not be commenting on what they see and know?
to put it into numbers - at 80C (353K) 1m2 radiates 880Watts
I think though that instead of the Moon we'll be putting data centers into orbit - for 1KWt GPU we'll need 5m2 solar panels and 1m2 radiator - all together under 10kg, ie. $1000 at Starship prices while the GPU itself is $20K+ .
The kicker here is that the Starship launch price is cheaper than installing solar on the ground ( $2K/KWt and higher)
Like geothermal cooling, kinda. Possibly a passive solution could work somewhat?
It'll be a temporary solution, the regolith will heat up eventually, but maybe it'll work for long enough?
That will probably work about as well as the proposal to put a data center on Sealand [1]. Or Cryptoland. Or Satoshi Island. Or Blueseed.[2]
Or the Space Kingdom of Asgardia, which launched a successful satellite with some data storage in 2017.[3] That lasted until 2022, when the satellite re-entered.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
There are a lot of countries with navies that could just happen to decide to conduct a live fire training exercise in the general area as your ocean facility and just happen to have an accident that takes you out, with enough plausible deniability that they probably would not get in any serious trouble over it.
There are a much fewer number of countries that could take out a lunar facility and I don't think any could do it in a way that has any plausible deniability.
Sure, but if the goal is to get around copyright law, i think the usa would be very happy to do it. No plausable deniability needed.
Why would countries not already do the same thing to commit high seas piracy today?
The people who originally sent the thing up, can give up their access.
As long as you don't have to physically touch the thing again, you can use some clever cryptography, so that no one is technically running it.
That's easiest, if you just let no one have any privileged access. But you can use (public key) cryptography or similar to give some anonymous people on earth access. Or, for peek publicity value, the data centre can give access to whoever holds a specific bitcoin.
And who will hold the keys?
You can really trade it as a token on some blockchain, and the data centre itself can read the chain (as long as someone sends it to them, but anyone can do that).
The data centre will do the bidding of whoever has the private key that's associated with that specific token on the blockchain.
But the whole blockchain bit isn't even necessary: some anonymous person on earth can hold the private key. When they want to pass on the rights to the datacentre, they send it a command (signed with their own private key) to obey some other key in the future.
Governments can't figure out who holds the relevant key. (At least not in theory. In practice, they can try to do classic spy craft and meta data analysis etc.)
So even though the owner of the key might sit in Germany or the US or Switzerland, those countries don't know that.
because no country on earth can utilize full space venture (yet), do you think this treaty will hold if lets say US decide that they would colonize the moon for a start because no one would be able to do anything
Is the fact that the moon isn't protected from radiation and covered in impact craters not indicative of its poor suitability?
Bury your computers under a few metres of regolith. Gravity on the moon is only a sixth of earth's, so it's relatively easy to pile up or dig down.
Middle English: from Old French lunatique, from late Latin lunaticus, from Latin luna ‘moon’ (from the belief that changes of the moon caused intermittent insanity).
And now the title on HN has been edited down to remove this most exquisite pun :'(
So what exactly is the threat model here? Astroid pulverises earth but moon somehow stays ok?
>it’s impossible to accommodate all potential customers in any one location, except in outer space
Extra territorial jurisdiction is a thing so don't think outer space treaty on sovereignty will help. Could just as well put it on the antarctic and that works better on cooling too.
It's cool as an experiment ofc but doesn't seem to make any sense.
In my experience, customers who have specific requirements about data sovereignty are also explicitly including backups in those requirements.
Setting feasibility aside, seems strictly like this is privacy for the entities that deserve it the least. Privacy is for the individual and their "owned" data, not for governments to craft digital black sites.
Building something on the moon would be cool, but a data center? Unlikely.
...or, just, use the moon servers as an extreme form of backups only. Rarely used, used only for the essential data.
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2022-12-14
3753 units, 113 prefixes, 120 nonlinear units
You have: (2 * 238854 mi) / c
You want: ms
* 2564.4291
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Biggest issue would be power. Not sure what the geothermal situation is there, but given that they get most of their power from diesel, it's probably not great. You could build a big solar array, but then you can only use it for 1/3 of the year.
Btw, instead of Antarctica, you could put your data centre in Iceland (with more or less the same pros, but fewer cons). And: people are actually doing that!
If you run your computers at about 60C, that's still plenty of difference.
You can also look into dumping your heat into water. Either ocean or freshwater.
Sure, boil the oceans we don't need em
It approximately doesn't matter in the longer run and on a global scale whether you release your heat into the ground, atmosphere or sea. It's all conducted around sooner or later anyway.
It's hard to imagine any scenario where this proposal really makes sense.
Oh, yes yes yes. Until it stops working entirely, that is. Some resistance is part of the design. Ask any LN2 overclocker.
Circa the "glory days" in 2007, "Google Moonbase" was the (90%? jokingly) go-to answer internally for the next crazy, ambitious project the company should work on. "Google Moonbase" was also the go-to answer when friends or family would ask what cool thing you're working on. Especially if you were working on actually secret projects like Chrome or Android at the time.
It would probably be cheaper to put it in the caldera of an active volcano than on the Moon. You could certainly get a bathysphere full of archival tape to the bottom of the Challenger Deep for less than you could get the same on the Moon.
Probably about as survivable, too.
Starship, if they solve the remaining issues before politics catches up with them, could solve the first problem.
I've seen some interesting ideas for contact-free drilling that might help with the second, but for now they're experimental* — we've got a lot of things in space tech that need R&D spending, which is a great opportunity on a forum like Hacker News, but does mean dreamers like me need to wait.
>Lonestar’s CEO Christopher Stott says it is to protect sensitive data from Earthly hazards.
If storing your data into 2 or 3 datacenters spread across the planet isn't safe enough from disaster, it's not clear that the moon will be any better since after a global disaster that destroys all copies of the data, it's likely that there will be no one left on earth that still needs or wants that data.
In practical terms though copying data to every aws region on earth would be cheaper. Or would it? :thinking face:
Why not just in orbit around the earth? It could be placed on the opposite side of the sun so it's always in the dark if they think that's a compelling reason.
It's supposed to be able to travel/hop up to 100m high with a range of 25km from Athena to dive into ditches with shadow areas. Quite an interesting mission.
Landing is scheduled for March 6.
Engineering is about cost and benefit tradeoffs, compared to alternatives. The "moon data center" does not check any of those boxes.
Solar panels can provide the electricity for the datacenter. Those will be installed in the nearest shore (sea water destroys even solar panels)
Probably better to just do it in Greenland.
Seems like it's only a matter of time before someone deploys their capital to another space rock, convinces people to go with them, and then declares sovereignty of that rock. What comes with that is all the same stories history tells over and over, just again, on a different rock.
I do think the moon has an advantage from a standpoint that the material is already there. You have to "shoot up hill" to stop the gun from getting loaded.
They're putting satelites in orbit around the moon that contain storage for backups.
They're going to make bank. Genius.
Plus the ping to the moon would be miserable…
Got it
Confidential, until someone builds a lunar rover to crawl into your 'data center'. Alarms would do what?
Integrity? Radiation. Moon dust. Micrometeorites. Enjoy beating the universe at its forever game.
Availability? Your data is literally on the moon.
Yeah it's a gimmick. Founders will go on to do something else one VC money runs out and they've had fun with their salaries.
And leave us here in peace..
I fear however that it's more likely to be a grift