A rocket has successfully launched carrying a data center to the Moon.

The Intuitive Machines' Athena lander is expected to attempt a lunar landing on 6 March, and will carry multiple payloads. Among them is a small hardware deployment from Lonestar Data Holdings, set to be the first data center on the Moon.

Intuitive Machines achieved a soft landing on the Moon this time a year ago, a first for a private company, but the 'Odysseus' lander broke a leg and fell on its side. That mission carried a virtual Lonestar payload that was just software.

For this mission, Lonestar has sent an 8TB SSD and a single Microchip PolaFire SoC FPGA, which the company will use to further test the concept of lunar data centers and see how storage behaves on the surface.

Further in the future, it hopes to deploy fully fledged data centers - potentially in protected lunar tunnels - as a form of disaster recovery for the Earth.

The Athena lander also includes a deployment from Nokia to test 4G/LTE communications on the lunar surface.

We attended the rocket launch for the cover feature of the next issue of the DCD Magazine. You are not going to want to miss it. Subscribe for free today.