Lonestar Data Holdings, based in St. Petersburg, Fla., is closing $5 million in seed funding toward its goal of creating the ultimate in data-storage disaster recovery — with server farms located in lava tubes on the Moon.

The company has signed contracts to launch prototype demonstrations of its capabilities aboard lunar landers by the end of 2022. Lonestar will run a software-only test, storing a small big of data on an Intuitive Machines lander under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The mission is expected to last one lunar day, or two Earth weeks.

A second launch scheduled for 2023 will send an Intuitive Machines lander to the Moon’s South Pole to drill for ice. Included in the package will be Lonestar’s first hardware prototype: a one-kilogram storage device, the size of a hardback novel, with 16 terabytes of storage, reports The Register. more “Data Centers in Lava Tubes — an Economic Driver for the Moon?”

Some scientists and engineers say that solar energy could be captured in space and beamed to Earth as microwaves or laser beams within the next ten years, reports the Wall Street Journal in a special feature, “The Next Bets for Renewable Energy.”

“The basics are to put a large, very large platform in space, harvest sunlight, where the sun shines, essentially 99.95% of the time, and send it to markets on the ground, where, on average, the sun is shining only about 15% of the time,” says former NASA scientist John Mankins, president of Mankins Space Technology, a company working on developing a 1-mile-wide solar power satellite prototype that will use microwave beaming.

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has already tested the feasibility of transferring energy using microwave transmission, sending 1.6 kilowatts a distance of more than 0.6 miles. Japanese engineers have sent a comparable amount of energy the length of a football field. Meanwhile, the California Institute of Technology plans to test prototypes that can transfer power by means of a steerable microwave beam by the end of 2022. more “Space-Based Solar Power Within Ten Years?”

The European Space Agency (ESA) has issued a call for ideas for creating a network of lunar telecommunications and navigation satellites. The Moonlight initiative would allow dozens of planned lunar missions to share the same infrastructure to communicate with Earth and find their way to the lunar surface, according to an ESA press release republished in GPS World.

Two consortia of companies have completed their concept reviews, which set out their business and technical analysis of a lunar network. The next step will defining a detailed system architecture and identifying the most suitable partnership models between private space companies and ESA.

One consortium headed by Telespazio includes private manufacturing and engineering companies, universities and research centers and startups.

A second consortium headed by Surry Satellite Technology Limited includes satellite manufacturer Airbus, a satellite network providers, a satellite navigation cmopanies, and the goonhilly Earth Station, a UK-based radio communication station..

Long-term colonization of the Moon will require settlers to grow much of their own food, and they won’t have any soil rich in organic matter to start with. Hydroponics is one alternative. Growing plans in mineral-rich lunar regolith is another.

Dutch researchers with Wageningen University & Research have been testing a variety of vegetables to see how well they fare in regolith — tomatoes, rye, watercress, leeks, quinoa, peas, radish, spinach, arugula and chives.

The researchers couldn’t use real lunar regolith, but they created a substitute with similar chemical composition from volcanic ash near Flagstaff, Arizona. (To simulate Martian material, they found ash from Hawaii.) Regolith has only a small amount of reactive nitrogen, a critical element for life, and it can store only 30% as much water as organic Earth soil can.

The researchers set up trays containing the lunar regolith, Martian regolith and Earth soil, watered them each day, and studied the results over five months. Their findings, according to Smithsonian magazine:

• Radishes, cress and rye could be harvested and produce seeds.
• Tomatoes and peas could be harvested.
• Chives and leeks grew slower than normal.
• Quinoa produced flowers but no seeds.

more “Yes, Plants Can Grow in Lunar Regolith, But Not All Thrive”

The near-term business model of SpaceX is to build a constellation of satellites to deliver cheap, space-based broadband service. The biggest obstacle may not be putting the 100-plus satellites into orbit, reports CNN. It may be connecting with the ground.

The big question is how customers will access the network. Customers of the Starlink service would need high-tech antennas they can stick on the roofs or yards to establish an Internet connection. The technology exists. But SpaceX needs to build terminals that are affordable, reliable and low maintenance.

The company is putting “a lot of engineering” resources into developing the terminals, said Gwynne Shotwell in a recent meeting with reporters. “Because if we don’t get it right, we’re in deep doo-doo.”

In the 1990s several well-funded ventures attempted to build satellite constellations to service roughly half the world’s population lacking access to traditional Wi-Fi and cell services. All of them changed plans, went bankrupt or liquidated after realizing it would be impractical. Antenna technology has come a long way since the 1990s, but observers predict it will be difficult for SpaceX to build terminals at price points needed to grow the market enough to turn a profit.

Telecom services like Dish Network rely upon satellites in geosynchronous orbit about 20,000 miles from Earth. The drawback is that traveling 20,000 miles and back creates frustrating delays for users. SpaceX would solve the latency issue by using satellites that orbit about 340 miles overhead. But that creates a new problem. The antennas on the ground have to maintain connections with the satellites as they streak across the sky.

Bill Milroy, chief technology officer at U.S.-based antenna maker ThinKom, thinks it could get the price of a terminal down to $1,000, about the price of an iPhone 11. But attracting customers in poor regions of the globe at that price would be difficult. SpaceX would need to get the price down to $150 a piece to make significant inroads.

China may not have been the first nation to land a human on the Moon, but it was the first to land a plant on Earth’s satellite and prompt it to germinate. The Chang’e 4 lunar lander held a small tank containing plant seeds. And now, a Chinese scientific team has announced, a cotton seed has sprouted.

Scientists aboard the International Space Station regularly tend plants to study had microgravity effects growth. But the closest terrestrial vegetation has come to the Moon was in 1981 when Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Rosa carried hundreds of tree seeds to orbit the Moon with him. Many were planted back on Earth, becoming “Moon Trees,” reports Space.com.

The Chinese lander also contains seeds to grow potatoes and Arabidopsis, a common lab plant, but neither have sprouted so far. The Chang’e 4 lander, perched inside Von Karman Crater on the far side of the Moon, is accompanied by the Yutu 2 rover. Both robots are experiencing their first long, cold night on the Oon. Daytime and nighttime each last about two Earth weeks.