What would they use it for? The 2.5 seconds of latency would be too high for most uses. Cooling will be very difficult with no atmosphere. Solar power will be hard since night time lasts two weeks. Radiation will damage electronics unless they bury them.
It would depend on how critical the data is and if the cost benefit analysis breaks even or tips in favor of the moon. I would imagine housing state secrets up there would be reasonable, and documents (text files) don’t take up a huge amount of space. Video would be more challenging. But realistically you could probably store all of the Secret and Top Secret documents across a few servers with maybe 5 drives in a RAID config each. Probably even a single NAS-like solution.
I’m not sure if it would be better than a secret underground base… But you could do it.
With an underground base you could even have the one connection to it be a hard-line, not wireless. You could construct it with a smaller crew, easier to keep under wraps. And I expect that would still be less than 1/100th the price of building it on the moon.
Anyway, I do think the ultimate off site data storage location is a pretty entertaining idea, i’d bet it could make sense for some things, I just can’t imagine what.
What would they use it for? The 2.5 seconds of latency would be too high for most uses. Cooling will be very difficult with no atmosphere. Solar power will be hard since night time lasts two weeks. Radiation will damage electronics unless they bury them.
No hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, or other types of disasters on the moon. Asteroids are rare enough now that they basically don’t count.
Latency is high but it doesnt matter for data redundancy.
Ok… Data redundancy is a possible application… I will tentatively say that’s a feasible goal, if still probably a stupid one.
I mean, how often do data centers upgrade storage drives? Cause the cost of doing that in space is… unreasonable.
It would depend on how critical the data is and if the cost benefit analysis breaks even or tips in favor of the moon. I would imagine housing state secrets up there would be reasonable, and documents (text files) don’t take up a huge amount of space. Video would be more challenging. But realistically you could probably store all of the Secret and Top Secret documents across a few servers with maybe 5 drives in a RAID config each. Probably even a single NAS-like solution.
I mean, yeah, you could do that.
I’m not sure if it would be better than a secret underground base… But you could do it.
With an underground base you could even have the one connection to it be a hard-line, not wireless. You could construct it with a smaller crew, easier to keep under wraps. And I expect that would still be less than 1/100th the price of building it on the moon.
Anyway, I do think the ultimate off site data storage location is a pretty entertaining idea, i’d bet it could make sense for some things, I just can’t imagine what.
Except radiation is much much higher around the moon, resulting in greater corruption events
Craters at poles are in permanent shadows with -200 degrees permanently
Anything that needs a lot of data. Same reason you’d download something to your PC instead of streaming it.
Also for local processing before upload. If you have a huge data set that compresses well, it’s much better to compress first, then upload to Earth.