Hewlett Packard Enterprise plans to put a computer on the surface of the Moon. The company announced this month that Spaceborne Computer-4, a lightweight, self contained and fanless compute module built for space environments, will fly as a payload on Astrolab’s FLIP rover and run artificial intelligence applications and the first high performance computing benchmarks on the lunar surface, Datacenter Dynamics reported.
The mission is scheduled to launch in late 2026 under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. Voyager Technologies’ Griffin-1 lander will carry the FLIP rover to the lunar South Pole region, with the HPE module aboard, equipped with a low power central processor and graphics processor and solid state storage from Kioxia. It will run large language models and process LiDAR data, and HPE will support Astrolab’s mission control in Hawthorne, California, with a private cloud environment.
The programme has a track record to build on. The first Spaceborne system, a proof of concept that commercial off the shelf hardware could survive in space, went to the International Space Station in August 2017 and returned in June 2019, and the more powerful Spaceborne-2 followed to the station in 2024. The lunar version is a harder test: no crew, no resupply, and radiation and thermal conditions at the South Pole.