St. Petersburg Data Company’s Light Brothers Moment

This is our Hawk moment for our kitten.

Just as the Wright brothers made history over 120 years ago, our startup with its first powered airmail near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, sent a commercial data center to the moon in March, completing a series of critical operational tests. At Lonestar Data Holdings in St. Petersburg, we saw it from pop-up mission control in the dark mailrooms in the sea and defense hubs that operate data centres from Earth to the Moon.

Like the Wright Brothers, our success was fleeting. Just a week into the month, the Athena Lander carrying our 8-terabyte data center fell to its side at the moon caterer, finishing the mission early. Luckily, and by design, we successfully completed all our tests on our way to the moon. We believe this achievement is a promise that it is as transcendent as a 12-second flight along North Carolina Beach many years ago.

Airplanes revolutionized travel in the 20th century, meeting the demand for faster and more reliable means of transportation. The 21st century is poised to revolutionize data storage and security to meet the pressing demand for protecting digital information, which is essential to maintaining our way of life. Everything we do in space is aimed at improving our life on Earth.

This is a pivotal moment in the evolution of the space industry. At its core, NASA has always conquered new frontiers beyond the moon, so it has always been a public-private partnership in nature. The commercial space industry is currently leveraging its partnerships and what it learns from innovation, exploration and creating high-paying, high-tech jobs.

FLORIDA – Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, and so many historic launches from Moonshot to Shuttle Flights are located at the epicenter. With help from Space Florida, Florida’s independent Aerospace Finance and Development Agency, Florida’s space economy is thriving with new private partnerships, startups and fundraising initiatives. The state attracted more than $2 billion in private investment in space transport in 2024, and Space Florida reported that the project was $6.8 billion in pipelines.

Our story is a Florida story with global meaning. Founded in 2021, Lonestar Data Holdings meets the market demand for secure data storage. A fire burned in an ancient library – data – data – data – data – data – data – data – data. Billions of dollars are now lost when digital data is destroyed by weather-related events, hackers, accidents, human error and other forces. That data is essential to doing everything from governments to businesses to electrical grids.

If digital data on Earth is invaluable yet fragile, do you probably need to keep a copy somewhere? The moon is far from the threats of this planet, including weather, war, hackers. Lonestar successfully sent client data twice a month. On this latest trip, the £2 black box contained eclectic information, including Florida disaster recovery documents, data from private companies, Magna Carta and Imagine Dragons music videos.

Like the Wright Brothers, we continue to learn and evolve. The next planned large data center launch will be in 2027. The aim is to place it in the lunar orbit rather than on the surface of the moon. It protects data safely from our planet, while eliminating the risk of landing.

Our headquarters in St. Petersburg is blocked from where the world’s first planned commercial airline flights crossed Tampa Bay, on the New Year’s Day of 1914. Over a century later, we embark on a new flight that will be as transformative as one of the biggest challenges of the time.

Chris Stott is the founder of Lonestar Data Holdings in St. Petersburg, a pioneering data center infrastructure and services company.