By David Bullock
“For us as a technological civilization, the two most important things are us [humankind], and our data. If we lose our data, we lose our species,” said Chris Stott, founder and CEO of Lonestar Data Holdings. The company’s goal is to have data storage on the Moon, with its mission statement, “Saving Earth’s data, one byte at a time.”
What started as a conversation with a customer at a TEDx event in Vancouver in April 2018, Stott, the CEO of ManSat a satellite spectrum provider with 23 years of success, was talked into storing data in space from the new client.
According to Stott, the customer said, “We have a problem, could you help us?”
“I love that,” reacted Stott a Boeing and Lockheed veteran, “That’s a customer in need.”
Lonestar says it is driven by demand. Stott said, “So as we say in the space industry, ‘It is demand-pull, as opposed to technology push.’ So it was reacting to customer needs and the marketplace for a very secure offsite diversified backup.”
Solving that initial customer’s pain point has led the company to analyze the world’s data situation.
The demand for data has risen, for example. We’re losing data all the time, some of it from cybercrime, like ransomware attacks. The argument is that we need to back data up to a super secure location. After looking at jamming issues, among other data problems, Lonestar tried to find the solution set to the data security and storage problem.
It initially looked at satellites orbiting the Earth in low Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit. “We took a step back and looked at the Earth’s largest satellite,” said Stott. “The excess capacity on landers could be used on the Moon.”
Since that revelation, a payload has been built, but it needs to pass all its testing. The company has set up two launches this year.
The state of Florida bought the entirety of the first test’s storage and allowed us to do proof of concept. It’s the company’s first payload and will be a part of one of NASA’s CLPS missions.
CLPS is a NASA program financially supporting missions to the Moon.
Lonestar chose to rideshare with Intuitive Machines’ lunar lander that is working with CLPS. It will be Intuitive Machines’ first dedicated launch. Intuitive Machines, in turn, chose to launch from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for a 2023 launch.
If the launch and landing are successful, Lonestar will have history’s first data center off planet.
Stott has been in the space and satellite industry for a quarter of a century. Back in 2000, he founded a startup company, ManSat.
ManSat has been in business for 23 years and is the world’s largest provider of satellite spectrum. It works with about 17 countries.
The C-suite of Lonestar consists of individuals coming from companies such as Google, Morgan Stanley, Comsat, the US Army, and Honeywell.
The company sees its demand for its products coming from disaster recovery and edge processing through a lunar cloud.
“We just expand that Internet bubble to the Moon,” summed Stott.