Lonestar’s Freedom Ready for Next Lunar Data Center Mission

Lonestar Data Holdings, Inc., the 1st company in the world to provide a commercial data center service from the surface of the Moon,  announced that its next Lunar Data Center, Freedom, completed testing and integration into Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission lander, named Athena, and was delivered to Cape Canaveral, FL.

Freedom Payload on Board Athena

In coordination with SpaceX, the liftoff of the IM-2 lunar mission is targeted for a multi-day launch window that opens no earlier than February 26, 2025. In case of unfavorable launch conditions, such as inclement weather, backup opportunities will be determined based on the lunar blackout window and other factors.

The Freedom Payload marks a significant leap forward in Lonestar’s ambitious vision to provide global backup, global refresh, and global restore, by establishing the 1st physical data center beyond Earth, offering DR and Resiliency as a Service (RaaS) premium backup services, and edge processing capabilities from the ultimate edge: cislunar space and the lunar surface. Freedom Payload hosts a number of storage and edge processing customers.

Lonestar’s 1st mission, featuring the Independence virtual data center payload, demonstrated success in February 2024, operating seamlessly in both cislunar space and from the lunar surface. The data from this mission was successfully transmitted and retrieved, marking a significant milestone in the testing and development of the data services offering.

This success cleared the path for Lonestar’s Freedom Payload mission, which distinguishes itself as a groundbreaking technological achievement, the first data center off planet and the first to the Moon. the 3D-printed exterior of the data center has been designed by world renowned team of architect Bjarke Ingels of BIG to reflect the silhouettes of NASA Astronauts Charlie Duke (Apollo Moonwalker) and Nicole Stott (Space Station Space Walker) in tribute to the Artemis campaign.

Freedom was built for Lonestar by its contractor, SpaceBlt (formerly Skycorp). The data center is equipped with storage from Phison. Also on board is an ARMAS Radiation sensor being flown for SpaceBlt built by Environmental Technologies.

The Freedom Payload represents the 1st data center ever flown to the Moon and a new frontier in DR and processing capabilities, setting a new benchmark for what is possible in space-based data services. The capacity on Lonestar’s upcoming mission is already sold out.