Data resilience firm, Lonestar and semiconductor expert Phison, did something truly out-of-this-world last Wednesday. They launched the infrastructure for a lunar data center on a SpaceX rocket - a premier venture in data storage at a truly cosmic level!

Imagine sending your company's data, securely sealed into solid-state drives (SSDs) made for data centers, and having it touch down on the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It’s real, it happened on March 4, and it's the beginning of a moon-based data center expansion that could eventually store an astonishing petabyte of information.

Chris Stott, the brains and creative powerhouse behind Lonestar, gave TechCrunch the backstory. As early as 2018, he developed the idea of housing data beyond our stratosphere, where it could dodge earthly risks like hacking and natural catastrophes. He even equated data with oil, but deemed it far more valuable. Partnering with Phison was the obvious move – a team already adept at creating storage for space projects via NASA's Perseverance Rover on Mars and expert at custom-designing storage through their service, Imagine Plus.

When Lonestar and Phison teamed up in 2021, things really took off! They designed SSDs perfect for the cosmic climate and rigorously tested them. After all, there's no roadside recovery service in space! As Chris Stott emphasized, the SSDs' lack of moving parts made them the ideal technology for their ground-breaking space storage initiative.

Customers have already been sending their data into space with full confidence. In fact, the inaugural launch was packed with a sheer diversity of data! It covered recovery data for several governments, language model data for a space agency, and even a music video from the band Imagine Dragons.

Yet, Lonestar isn't alone in their lunar ambition. Lumen Orbit, a graduate of Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch and now known as Starcloud, also holds a stellar place in the expanding universe of space-based data storage solution providers.

With the rise of AI and its insatiable hunger for hardware, many more companies are likely to look skyward. After all, space offers near-endless storage potential and a renewable power source that's out of this world - solar energy; both are gains that terrestrial data centers simply don't have.

In Lonestar's future, if all proceeds as planned, they aim to join forces with satellite maker Sidus Space. Their joint venture endeavours to create six space-worthy storage devices set for cosmic voyages between 2027 and 2030.

Reminiscing about the NASA Apollo missions, Stott marveled at how far technology had come. Comparing the 2 kilobytes of RAM and 36 kilobytes of the Apollo computer storage with the 1 Gigabyte of RAM and 8 Terabytes offered by Phison Pascari today, Stott couldn't help but express just how amazing this journey had been.