![\"Mark](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/5303993.webp\")
<\/p>\nForget space datacenters. Before the end of the year, HPE will have AI running on the Moon.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t some exec\u2019s loony fantasy either. HPE has been building orbital compute platforms for the International Space Station (ISS) for years. Now, it\u2019s sending its fourth-gen Spaceborne Computer to the Moon aboard Astrolab\u2019s Flex Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) lunar rover.<\/p>\n
Part of NASA\u2019s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, the rover is set to be deployed near the Moon\u2019s south pole by the Voyager Technologies Griffin-1 lander later this year.<\/p>\n
Assuming a safe landing on the surface, FLIP will serve as a test bed for a range of emerging technologies including HPE\u2019s latest space-faring compute platform.<\/p>\n
Specifically, Spaceborne Computer 4, which for the sake of brevity we\u2019ll just call SBC4, will carry out a number of AI and HPC-centric experiments during the rover\u2019s year long mission on the lunar pole.<\/p>\n
What we know about SBC4 so far<\/p>\n
The actual silicon powering SBC4 is still a bit of a mystery. We\u2019re told the reason for the secrecy largely comes down to the high-risk nature of the mission. If the hardware fails, HPE\u2019s compute partner doesn\u2019t want their name tied to it.<\/p>\n
No guts but for the glory, we suppose, though Kioxia doesn’t seem too worried.<\/p>\n
What we do know is that it is equipped with a low-power central processing unit, a graphics processor, and will be equipped with a pair of mirrored Kioxia SSDs totaling 1 TB of capacity. That said, while it’ll be among the most powerful computers on the Moon, it’s still a pretty small system. The FLIP rover doesn’t have an unlimited power or thermal budget. The rover’s radiators can only dissipate so much heat.<\/p>\n
Measuring in at around 5×10 inches and about an inch thick, while not a particularly big system, it’s still large enough to house any number of existing compute platforms. For all we know, it could be powered by Nvidia\u2019s GB10, AMD\u2019s Xilinx Versal AI, or the guts of an old smartphone. We won’t know until the thing powers up.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Mark Fernandez, HPE\u2019s chief scientist of space tech and solutions, holds up the Spaceborne Computer 4 which will power the FLIP rover’s AI and HPC experiments once it makes it to the Moon.
\n Tobias Mann\n <\/p>\n
Less of a mystery is what SBC4 will be running and where. NASA plans to run a series of tuned LLM tests on the system, including a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system to assist with searching and interpreting onboard documents. Additionally, the system will be tasked with running machine learning algorithms against camera and LiDAR data.<\/p>\n
However, without knowing how large these LLMs are, it\u2019s hard to infer the nature of the underlying hardware. We\u2019re told to expect more details about the chips powering SBC4 once it\u2019s up and running.<\/p>\n
Alongside AI, SBC4 will also run several high performance computing (HPC) benchmarks designed to push the system to its limits. These benchmarks include high performance Linpack (HPL) and high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG), which means HPE and Astrolab will soon hold the distinction of the first Top500 submission made from a celestial body.<\/p>\n
Not only do HPE\u2019s systems power some of the fastest supercomputers on Earth, but they could soon hold the number one spot on the Moon \u2014 not that that\u2019s a particularly high bar.<\/p>\n
Beyond bragging rights, a workload like HPL could have other benefits like helping to keep the rover from icing over during the roughly 14-day-long night cycles the rover will repeatedly endure over the course of its mission.<\/p>\n
Hardening SBC4 for the Moon<\/p>\n
The Rover and by extension SBC4 will have to contend with extreme vibration stresses during launch and landing, wild temperature swings, not to mention cosmic rays and solar radiation since the Moon lacks the thick atmosphere and magnetic field that shields terrestrial compute.<\/p>\n
But, as it turns out, radiation might not be as big a problem as you\u2019d think. According to Fernandez, SBC4 is largely assembled from off-the-shelf components, including the solid state drives.<\/p>\n
The compute platform is using standard Kioxia BG6 M.2 drives with the main line of protection being a software RAID 1.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a silent mirror. The boot order is to try this and if something has happened to it, go here,\u201d Mark Fernandez, HPE\u2019s chief scientist of space tech and solutions, explained. \u201cWith our nine years’ experience in the Space Station using drives, we\u2019ve even convinced them we don\u2019t need to do anything special for space.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, this wasn\u2019t always the thinking. As we reported<\/a> at the time, early Spaceborne Computers suffered from high SSD failure rates. But as it turned out, so did the same drives deployed terrestrially. The cause of the failures wasn\u2019t cosmic rays or energetic particles from the Sun, but rather bad capacitors, he explained. \u201cI\u2019ve had zero SSD failure since 2019.\u201d<\/p>\n While off-the-shelf electronics are surprisingly radiation resistant \u2014 at least within FLIP\u2019s mission parameters \u2014 HPE has invested heavily in software based redundancy and recovery.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fernandez calls this \u201chardware hardening in software.\u201d The idea being that the spare CPU cycles are used to continuously monitor and compare hardware metrics against a state table. If a parameter exceeds the specified threshold, SBC4 will take action to protect itself.<\/p>\n \u201cAt a high level, I say, I like to be running at full speed. I can’t do that. I’ll run at a slower speed. If I can’t do that, I’d like to be booted, but not running anything, and then maybe the server will recover. And worst case, I’d like to be powered down rather than get destroyed,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n At the edge of the edge<\/p>\n FLIP is primarily intended as a proof of concept vehicle, which is to say it\u2019s a test bed for technologies that may eventually find their way to the Moon on other missions.<\/p>\n The inclusion of SBC4 reflects the realities of operating at the far edge of Earth\u2019s orbit. The latency between Earth and the Moon is nowhere near as bad as Mars’s up to 44 minute round-trip communication time, but even 2.5 seconds makes real-time control from Houston, or in this case Astrolab\u2019s mission control, which by the way is also powered by HPE’s Greenlake Private Cloud stack, in Hawthorne, California a bit unwieldy.<\/p>\n Further complicating matters is the bandwidth afforded the rover. When Artemis 2 traveled around the Moon earlier this year, astronauts weren\u2019t able to send back high-res photographs in real time due to the lack of bandwidth. It was only after the mission was on its way back to Earth that they were able to establish a big enough pipe to transmit the full-res images.<\/p>\n For this reason, SBC4 is designed to operate \u201cat the edge of the edge,\u201d Fernandez said.<\/p>\n Given the bandwidth constraints, it\u2019s far easier to process as much of the data and telemetry gathered by the rover\u2019s array of cameras, lidars, and environmental sensors locally.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important to ship back insight to Earth rather than all the raw data whenever possible. So having the edge compute capability to process the raw data locally, save on bandwidth back to Earth,\u201d Astrolab CEO Jaret Matthews said.<\/p>\n Matthews isn\u2019t the only one to share this perspective. Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described<\/a> the challenges and opportunities of space-based computing with analysts during the company\u2019s Q1 earnings call.<\/p>\n “There are many different computing problems that really want to be done in space,” he said at the time. “One of the best use cases of GPUs in space is imaging. To be able to do imaging at very large, very high resolutions, extremely large scales and very, very fast, it’s hard to do that by sending petabytes and petabytes of imaging data back here on Earth and doing that work, it’s easier just to do it out in space.”<\/p>\n Though others’ ambitions are far greater. Google, Amazon, and SpaceX are all touting<\/a> orbital datacenters powered by the Sun as the answer to terrestrial power constraints \u2014 Elon Musk wants you to believe he’ll eventually be manufacturing<\/a> deep-space datacenters on the Moon and lobbing them into the far reaches of the solar system using mass drivers \u2014 the economics of getting those bit barns into low Earth orbit remain unproven and so far unviable.<\/p>\n Despite this, executives and administrators at HPE, Astrolab, Kioxia, and NASA believe that space-based datacenters are still feasible long term.<\/p>\n FLIP<\/p>\n HPE\u2019s Spaceborne Computer 4 will be one of several payloads aboard the FLIP rover.<\/p>\n FLIP will be the largest rover launched by the US since the Apollo program\u2019s manned Moon buggy. And it is by no means small. Designed by Astrolab while measuring roughly 7 feet (2.13 meters) in length and weighing about half a ton, the rover is packed to the gills with cameras, sensors, and even a projector which will eventually be used in place of LCDs on future manned missions to the lunar surface.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n Astrolab CEO Jaret Matthews showcases the FLIP rover from within the company’s Hawthorne, California cleanroom as it’s prepped for its launch to the lunar surface later this year. For FLIP\u2019s purposes, it\u2019ll mostly be used to project partners’ logos onto the Moon\u2019s surface as a sorta advertising gimmick to keep the lights on back at Astrolab\u2019s facilities in Hawthorne while it works on its FLEX rover, which Matthews characterizes as a sort of F150 or Caterpillar tractor for the Moon.<\/p>\n Beyond the scientific equipment, solar panels, and radiators, arguably FLIP\u2019s most striking feature is its disproportionately large wheels. Developed by Venturi Space, along with the rover\u2019s battery pack, these wheels are designed to function much like a pneumatic tire, just without air or rubber. Their size is also intentional. The same wheels found on FLIP are intended for use on NASA\u2019s CLV-1 rover, which is slated to launch in 2028.<\/p>\n Much like FLIP offers HPE as a proving ground to test its lunar compute platform, the rover will do the same for Venturi\u2019s wheels.\u00a0<\/p>\n Spaceborne Computer 4 and FLIP are slated to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket later this year and will fly to the Moon\u2019s south pole by Astrobotic\u2019s Griffin-1 lander.\u00a0<\/p>\n Griffin is classified as a medium class lander measuring roughly 15 feet around and 6.5 feet tall (that\u2019s about 4.5 and 2 meters for those of you living in a nation civilized enough to use metric outside the sciences).<\/p>\n The lander is equipped with seven main engines responsible for everything from trans-lunar injection, trajectory correction, lunar orbit insertion, and powered descent to the surface. Four clusters of attitude control thrusters, meanwhile, will (hopefully) keep the thing pointed the right way up.<\/p>\n FLIP is expected to touch down near the Mons Mouton area along the edge of the South Pole before the end of the year. \u00ae<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Forget space datacenters. Before the end of the year, HPE will have AI running on the Moon. This…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":809349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-809348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=809348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/809349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=809348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=809348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=809348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"AstroLab](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/5303995.webp\")
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\n Tobias Mann\n <\/p>\n![\"After](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/5303999.webp\")
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