Hewlett Packard Enterprise plans to send its new Spaceborne Computer-4 to the Moon in late 2026, marking what the company says will be the first high-performance computing benchmarks on the lunar surface. The lightweight compute module will ride aboard Astrolab’s FLIP rover as part of a mission for the Moon Base program.
Griffin-1 Lander Heads for the Lunar South Pole
The mission is scheduled to launch in late 2026 under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. A Voyager Technologies Griffin-1 lander will transport the Astrolab FLIP rover to the lunar South Pole region. Once deployed, the rover will operate for a single lunar day, which lasts about 14 Earth days, before attempting to survive the lunar night in hibernation, according to Tom’s Hardware.
Engineering a Fanless Module for the Lunar Environment
Because the Moon lacks an atmosphere to move air across a standard heatsink, HPE built Spaceborne Computer-4 as a self-contained, fanless module. The hardware utilizes a specialized housing with an intricate lattice structure and a space radiator that sheds heat directly into a rover mounting plate. The compute blade measures roughly 10 inches long and 4 inches wide, housing a low-power central processing unit, a graphics processing unit, and 1 terabyte of flash memory storage inside solid-state drives from Kioxia.
$HPE Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Partners With NASA and Deloitte to Bring AI and High-Performance Computing to the Moon⠀• Spaceborne Computer-4 will deploy aboard Astrolab's FLIP lunar rover, targeting a late-2026 launch under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.…
Executing Benchmarks and AI Workloads on the Surface
The system will run standard numerical workloads including High Performance LINPACK and High Performance Conjugate Gradients, alongside large language model retrieval-augmented generation, vision inference, and LiDAR data processing for mapping and navigation. HPE will also support Astrolab’s mission control in Hawthorne, California, using a private cloud environment to manage and automate workloads from Earth. NASA and Deloitte are joining the mission to deploy additional AI workloads.
Tracing the Evolution of Spaceborne Computing
- August 2017: The original HPE Spaceborne Computer launched to the International Space Station as a proof of concept, later returning to Earth in June 2019 after surpassing one teraflop of performance.
- 2024: The more powerful Spaceborne-2 system deployed to the International Space Station.
- October 20: HPE announced that HPE Spaceborne Computer-4 will take AI and high-performance computing tests to the Moon.
- Late 2026: Spaceborne Computer-4 is slated to launch toward the lunar South Pole aboard the Griffin-1 lander and Astrolab FLIP rover.
Keep reading