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 theslightly 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
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