Enjoying yourself at the most magical place on Earth? If not, Mickey might know.
How NASA plans to back up data on lunar soil
Let me ask you a question: Do you think the cloud is a safe place to back up your data, the world’s treasures and government secrets? In a world of increasing breaches, hackers and threats, even cloud storage might not be enough.
Welcome to the next frontier: Lunar backups. NASA is teaming up with Lonestar, a Florida-based startup, and the Isle of Man, that self-governing British Crown Dependency you might’ve never heard of, to store data on the moon. Think of it like the ultra-secure Fort Knox but for digital information.
🚀 Blockchain goes intergalactic
How do you keep data safe on the moon? By using a blockchain — the same tech behind crypto. It ensures data is secure, genuine and tamper-proof. This isn’t your mom’s filing cabinet; it’s out of this world.
The first data cube, “Freedom,” landed on the moon in February 2024, proving the concept works. Lonestar’s first commercial mission takes off in 2026. Oh, and the Isle of Man’s post office got in on the fun, too, sending digital stamps to the moon. Now that’s first-class mail.
🌝 Why the moon?
The moon isn’t becoming a storage locker for your embarrassing selfies. The mission is first to preserve humanity’s crown jewels — our most vital data. Think of it as Earth’s external hard drive or a modern Library of Alexandria (hopefully, with a less tragic end).
What’s on the moon-bound list? Obvious candidates include:
- Scientific research: DNA sequencing data, climate models and pandemic studies.
- Cultural archives: Literary classics, historical texts and digitized art collections.
- Financial records: Stock market data, transaction histories and economic models.
- Health care information: Genome mapping and medical research.
- National security data: Sensitive classified information.
- Tech blueprints: Designs for critical infrastructure, from power plants to the internet backbone.
- “The Kim Komando Show”: Audio files of all my shows, because they’re that important to all mankind. (OK, I made that up!)
🌎 Earth vs. the moon
Not everyone’s on board with storing data on the moon. It’s not like you can send a tech to fix things. And retrieving something? Think “break glass in case of emergency,” not your daily backup.
Accessing lunar data would take spacecraft, encryption and dealing with space itself. Long-term storage? Sure. Easy? Not at all.
Surprise, iPhone 13 users: You just got a freebie. Apple’s iOS 18.5 will unlock satellite connectivity for iPhone 13 models. No hardware changes, just a software update. It’s carrier-dependent, so your provider might still hold you hostage, but it’s free to enable. Finally, you can ignore texts from space, not just Earth.
Over 200
That’s how many times one guy let snakes bite him. On purpose. He’s been building immunity for years to help cook up a universal antivenom. Most antidotes only work on one species, but his blood has already helped save mice from 13 of the 19 deadliest snakes on Earth. Talk about taking one for the team. Repeatedly.
1 billion
The number of humanoids Morgan Stanley expects to exist by 2050. Yes, that’s one bot for every eight people on Earth. So if your coworker gets replaced by a robot, don’t panic, statistically, so will you. If you’re picturing WALL-E with better knees and worse social skills, you’re not far off.
🐭 Ex-Disney worker headed to prison: After getting fired, Michael hacked company servers and messed with restaurant menus. He changed prices, added curse words, locked employees out of their accounts and, the kiss of death, even marked peanut items as “peanut-free.” The penalty? Three years in prison, definitely not the happiest place on Earth.
🛰️ High stakes laser tag: Amazon just fired its first 27 Kuiper satellites into orbit to take on Starlink, planning for 3,200 total. SpaceX already has 7,200 up there. Hope Earth’s atmosphere enjoys the new bumper-to-bumper congestion.
🛸 This is space-cial: The James Webb Space Telescope picked up traces of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide 124 light-years away, gases that, on Earth, only come from microorganisms like phytoplankton. The catch? It could also be from some chemical process we just don’t understand yet. Cue the X-Files theme.
Three per day
Satellite or rocket parts crash back to Earth. A 4-inch shard from the ISS punched through a Florida roof last month, as if those hurricanes weren’t bad enough. We may hit 15 daily as Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper launch more satellites. Did you hear about the film they’re making, where Dallas gets destroyed by space junk? Debris Does Dallas. (Thank you for that chuckle.)
🪐 A fishy planet: Scientists just got a whiff of something suspicious on K2-18b, a distant “hycean” world 120 light-years away. While scanning its atmosphere, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope picked up dimethyl sulfide, a gas that, here on Earth, only comes from living things like plankton. Looks like SpongeBob’s nemesis finally made it to the big time.
🚀 Baby, you’re a satanist: People can be so weird. Katy Perry, Lauren Sánchez and four other high-profile women just flew 66.5 miles above Earth in a Blue Origin rocket, crossing the Kármán line, officially entering space during the 11-minute joyride. Conspiracy theorists on X took to declaring the launch a satanic hoax filmed in a Hollywood pool, using green screens and scuba tanks, and that the mission patch is a satanic goat sigil if you squint, flip it and lose your mind.
$3 million
How much NASA is offering to anyone who can invent tech that recycles space poop. Why? Well, there are already 96 bags of human waste sitting on the moon from the Apollo missions. NASA wants to avoid adding to the mess or hauling it back to Earth by turning it into something useful. Uh … space compost, anyone?
3,028
How many people made Forbes’ 2025 Billionaires List. Leading the pack? Elon Musk at $342B, Mark Zuckerberg at $216B and Jeff Bezos at $215B. Altogether, the list is worth a ridiculous $16.1 trillion! For perspective, they could literally give every person on Earth $2,000, but they won’t.
8.2 billion
How many people we thought were on Earth. Researchers studied 35 years of data and say we’ve been underestimating rural populations by 53% to 84%. Turns out people are a lot harder to count when they don’t live near a Census office.
Space advertising: Imagine stepping outside to look at the stars … and seeing a giant glowing billboard in the sky. That could soon be a reality, with Russian companies planning to launch swarms of laser-equipped satellites to project light into Earth’s low orbit. The kicker? There’s no global ban on this yet.
👽 Just for the record, sleeve them alone: This is wild. NASA launched the Voyager 1 and 2, each carrying a Golden Record filled with photos and audio representing life on Earth almost 50 years ago. Think a nursing mother, nature pics and human speech. The kicker? Both spacecraft are experiencing major power problems. Aliens are more into comet books anyway.
NASA’s new mission to deal with space junk is Apollo G: Over 11,000 satellites orbit Earth. When they crash into each other, it creates junk. (We’re talking 40K pieces of debris in low orbit.) The fix: ELROI (Extremely Low Resource Optical Identifier). In you and me terms, it’s a solar powered, stamp-sized device that’s a license plate for space identification and communication.
3.1%
Odds of a “city killer” asteroid hitting Earth in 2032. That’s like guessing the right coin flip five times in a row. The 300-foot space rock could explode with 500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. The James Webb Space Telescope gets a closer look next month.
38,000 mph
Speed of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth. There’s a 2.3% chance it’ll impact in 2032. That’s the highest chance of any space rock we’ve spotted. At 460 feet wide, 2024 YR4 is 500 times more powerful than an atomic bomb. We’ll get a better look at where it’s heading in 2028. I’ll set a calendar reminder to update you!
12 times
As massive as Jupiter. That’s the size of an exoplanet spotted by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft. Some context: Jupiter is equal to about 318 Earths, so this thing is huge. The exoplanet, Gaia 4b, is 244 light-years away and 64% as big as the sun. A year there? About 570 Earth days.