HPE and Kioxia SSDs are going to the Moon

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HPE and Kioxia SSDs are going to the Moon
HPE wants to put Kioxia SSDs on the Lunar surface with its fourth Spaceborne Computer.
This Spaceborn Computer-4 (SBC-4) should travel to the moon as part of Astrolab’s FLIP rover for an upcoming mission for the Moon Base program.
HPE has so far sent three SBC generations to the International SpaceStation (ISS) and is now, literally, going further by having one operate on the moon’s surface. SBC-4 will be part of a mission that’s intended to launch in late 2026 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. After touching down at the Nobile Crater region near Mons Mouton at the lunar south pole, Voyager Technologies’ Griffin-1 lander will transport Astrolab’s FLIP rover, carrying HPE Spaceborne Computer-4 as a payload.
Scott Wiest, VP, fellow and global sales chief technologist, HPE, said: “For more than 70 years, HPE innovation has supported some of the world’s most important space missions. The next chapter of lunar exploration will depend on the ability to turn data into insights at the point of discovery. With HPE Spaceborne Computer-4, we are bringing AI and high performance computing to the lunar edge, helping the acceleration of scientific discovery and building the infrastructure for the next era of exploration.”
Griffin-1 is a commercial lunar lander developed by Astrobotic Technology, now operating as Voyager Lunar Systems under Voyager Technologies. Voyager acquired Astrobotic in 2026; the lander is built at facilities in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It will carry more than 1,100 pounds (455 kg) of cargo to the lunar surface. Astrolab's FLIP rover will be the largest commercial payload ever sent to the lunar surface.
The lander will carry about 10 scientific and demo payloads, including Astrolab’s FLIP rover (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform).This is a ~500 kg technology demonstrator and precursor to Astrolab’s larger FLEX rover. It carries instruments and hosts systems like HPE’s Spaceborne Computer-4. FLIP is designed to test mobility, batteries, tires, avionics, sensors, and software for future lunar vehicles.
Jaret Matthews, founder and CEO of Astrolab, said: “Our FLIP rover is designed to accommodate a variety of payloads, and this mission will demonstrate how commercial lunar mobility platforms can support technology development and scientific research.”
The FLIP rides on top of the Griffin lander, stacked on a cone/platform with ramps. Assuming a successful soft landing near the lunar south pole, the rover will reach the moon’s surface like this:
- It separates from the lander and begins a controlled descent down steep ramps.
- A fabric tether system wrapped around the rover’s rear wheels provides the control, allowing it to “rappel” or carefully lower itself down the incline onto the lunar surface. This approach was developed by Astrolab and its partner Venturi to handle the constrained geometry of the Griffin lander and various possible landing orientations/tilts.
- Once on the surface, FLIP drives away to begin its operations.
There’s a great animation on the Astrobotic website.
The SBC-4 is purpose-built as a compact (~249 × 132 × 26 mm), lightweight (~2.6 lb) aluminum, self-contained, and fanless compute module, designed to survive the harsh environment of the lunar South pole. It is equipped with both a low-power CPU and GPU. The compute module utilizes Kioxia SSD flash storage, specifically BG6 series client/M.2 NVMe SSDs; specifically two 1 TB models (mirrored via software RAID 1 for ~1 TB usable capacity).
These are not radiation-hardened products, being 2023-era, commercial off-the-shelf client SSDs, using the M.2 form factor, he host computer’s DRAM, and a PCIe gen4 bus. The FLIP rover has a limited power budget and these drives only draw 5W.
The SBC-4 will run Large language models (LLM) to deliver insights, analyze visual data, and support autonomous monitoring at the lunar edge. Tests will process LiDAR data for mapping, navigation, terrain analysis and infrastructure development, while an AI services container will demonstrate reliable deployment of scalable AI service applications on the Moon. The HPC side of things involves high-performance LINPACK (HPL) and high-performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) calculations being run.
SBC-4 software optimizes the required interaction with Earth-based resources and enables secure delivery of insights and results from the Moon back to Earth.
NASA and Deloitte Consulting are involved in SBC-4 workloads as well:
- NASA will run an AI neural net model trained on data from Earth, the Moon, and on the International Space Station, demonstrating coordination of three separate AI models, in a Federated Learning for Unbounded and Intelligent Decentralization (FLUID) experiment.IT will also conduct a tuned LLM test with semantic processing abilities to assist in searching and interpreting onboard documents.
- Deloitte's Silent Shield, a new system to detect cyber intrusions in space, will provide near real-time, predictive cyber-analytics and anomaly detection.
Cyber intrusions on the moon seem a tad unlikely and the Deloitte contribution appears somewhat premature.
HPE will support Astrolab’s mission control in Hawthorne, California using HPE Private Cloud to support real-time insights, delivered in a turnkey solution. HPE CloudOps Software will provide a unified, flexible environment for managing and automating workloads.
SBC Generations
HPE’s Spaceborne Computer program has so far sent three systems to the International Space Station (ISS).
- Spaceborne Computer-1 (SBC-1, also just called Spaceborne Computer)
- Launched: August 2017 on SpaceX CRS-12.
- Hardware: Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) HPE Apollo 40-based HPC server system. No traditional radiation hardening; protection relied on software monitoring that could throttle or adjust the system under stress.
- Purpose: Proof-of-concept experiment to show that unmodified (or lightly adapted) commercial servers could survive launch, operate reliably in space, and run scientific workloads. It achieved roughly 1 teraflop and became the first teraflop-class system in space.
- Duration: Operated for 615 days (well beyond the planned one-year mission) before returning to Earth in 2019. It demonstrated that software-based resilience could handle cosmic radiation and other space hazards.
- Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2)
- Launched: February 2021 on Northrop Grumman NG-15.
- Hardware: Combination of an HPE Edgeline EL4000 (edge-focused system with CPU + GPU) and an HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 (traditional 2-socket HPC node). Later storage upgrades added substantial Kioxia capacity.
- Purpose: Expanded edge computing and AI capabilities on the ISS. It enabled real-time processing of experiment data (e.g., image processing, DNA sequencing, healthcare, 3D printing, disaster recovery), dramatically reducing the volume of data that needed to be downlinked to Earth (sometimes by orders of magnitude). It ran dozens of research experiments and supported cloud bursting to Microsoft Azure in some cases.
- It proved more serviceable and capable than the first system and stayed operational for years.
- Spaceborne Computer-3
Launched: January 30, 2024, on Northrop Grumman NG-20 (SS Patricia Robinson).
- Hardware: Updated Edgeline + ProLiant configuration with a major storage expansion - over 130 TB of Kioxia SSDs (including 8× 1 TB XG6 NVMe M.2, 4× 960 GB RM6 SAS, and 4× 30.72 TB PM6 enterprise SAS drives). This was the largest amount of storage sent to the ISS on a single mission.
- Purpose: Further advance AI/ML workloads, larger datasets, and edge computing for scientific research on the ISS. HPE describes this as the program’s third journey/iteration to the station, building directly on the successful SBC-2 platform with software and storage improvements for more complex applications.
All three ISS systems used commercial off-the-shelf HPE servers (with software techniques for radiation resilience rather than specialized radiation-hardened chips) and demonstrated that modern computing can operate effectively in low Earth orbit inside a space station. Unlike the space environment outside the ISS, the interior has atmospheric pressure, temperature control, and insulation from solar radiation. Spaceborne Computer-4 is the next step: a much smaller, lower-power, fanless module designed for the lunar surface on Astrolab’s FLIP rover. There the environment is a vacuum and cold.
Bootnote 1
Sunlit surfaces near the south pole can reach roughly 200–300 K (−73 °C to about +27 °C / −100 °F to +80 °F), depending on slope, season, and exact location. Nighttime / shadowed areas drop much lower, often to ~40–100 K or below.
Bootnote 2
HPE claims “70 years of leadership in space exploration.” We understand this is based on:
- 1957: HP instruments (including the HP 560A Digital Recorder) were used by the Stanford Research Institute to track Russia’s Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. This was before NASA existed.
- 1958: HP equipment supported Explorer 1 (the first U.S. satellite) and the Pioneer Station deep-space antenna. NASA was founded that year.
- 1960s (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo): HP supplied medical recording systems for astronaut vital signs (e.g., on Gordon Cooper’s Faith 7 Mercury flight in 1963), digital voltmeters and oscilloscopes for Gemini, and critical cesium-beam frequency standards / atomic clocks that synchronized the Apollo tracking and communications network.
- Apollo 11 (1969): HP diodes, PIN switches, and related components were used in the Eagle lunar module and in the astronauts’ communication systems during the first Moon walk.
- 1975: An HP-65 programmable calculator served as a backup for rendezvous and guidance calculations on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (the first international docking).
- Later decades: HP calculators flew on Space Shuttle missions, HP medical equipment was used in microgravity research, and more recently HP/HPE systems (workstations, printers, and the Spaceborne Computer series starting in 2017) have operated on the International Space Station.
You might want to reflect if all of this constitutes “leadership in space exploration,” compared to, say, the Apollo moon landing program and SpaceX’ re-usable rockets. But SBC-4 on FLIP is stirring stuff, no question.
Bootnote 3
Astrobotic is a 2007 Carnegie Mellon University spinout. Voyager Technologies completed its acquisition of Astrobotic in July this year, for up to roughly $300 million ($162 million in cash and stock upfront, up to $129 million in performance-based earnouts, plus assumed debt). The unit now operates as Voyager Lunar Systems, with former Astrobotic CEO John Thornton continuing in a leadership role.
The core of Astrobotic’s funding has been NASA (especially CLPS task orders) and other U.S. government awards. That will be supplemented now by the resources of parent company Voyager Technologies.
Astrobotic has not had a successful Moon landing as of October 21, 2026. It’s Peregrine Mission One in January 2024 had a propellant leak shortly after separation from the Vulcan rocket, failed to reach the Moon, and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere after about 10–11 days. Here’s wishing it, and HPE, the very best of luck for FLIP.

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