LEOcloud and CommStar Space Communications Team to Provide Lunar Cloud Services

 November 16 2021

LEOcloud and CommStar announced today they have executed a Memorandum of Understanding by which they will co-develop advanced cloud computing services for government and commercial customers in Cislunar, as well as around and on the lunar surface. The development of such critical infrastructure requires low latency and high throughput connectivity. Managing future lunar critical infrastructure, e.g., robotics, habitations, sensors, will depend on cloud data services from providers such as LEOcloud from CommStar-1.

LEOcloud’s vision for Space Edge cloud infrastructure and services is extensible from LEO to the Moon and beyond. Edge computing brings the workload compute resources as close as possible to the sources and users of data with the competitive and mission-critical advantages of latency, security, availability, and sovereignty. End users can operate their services or application workloads in a seamless hybrid cloud environment just as they would on Earth.

CommStar intends to deploy an advanced communications satellite, CommStar-1, at Lagrange point 1 (L1), in late 2023, to serve as a Network Access Point (NAP), open to all interoperable users, “Always On, Always Available.” Partners, such as LEOcloud, will benefit from its broad service capabilities, enabling advanced service delivery, e.g., compute, cache, store, to end users, such as landers, habitations, industrial activities, as well as the emerging critical infrastructure on or below the lunar surface, essential to humankind’s return to the Moon.

“Amongst a number of challenges for data communications across Space – LEO, MEO, GEO, Cislunar, and now, the Moon, are the harsh operating environments, e.g., radiation, extreme temperatures, latency, and cost – Space, Weight, and Power (SWaP) – for service delivery. For example, latency between the Earth and the Moon is a minimum round-trip of 2600 milliseconds over a distance of 240,000 miles at Kilobits (Kbps) or Megabits (Mbps) of throughput. Latency from CommStar-1 situated at L1, however, will be 200 milliseconds with Gigabits (Gbps) of service throughput to the lunar surface – a substantial difference making provision of next generation cloud services, like LEOcloud’s, a reality at The Ultimate Edge™.” Said, Fletcher Brumley, CEO, CommStar Space.

“A permanent presence and mission success on the moon is not possible without high-speed communications and edge computing resources,” said Dennis R. Gatens, CEO and president of LEOcloud.

“End users on the Moon will require cloud services that provide the same experience and utility that exists on Earth. Our combined services will deliver such an end user experience.”