Coral Gables Will Back Up City Data in Orbit Under a 12-Month Pilot With Lonestar Space

CORAL GABLES — The City Beautiful is about to put some of its most important files a long way from City Hall. Coral Gables has been named a Founding City Partner for Lonestar Space’s StarVault network, a 12-month pilot that will test whether storing city data in orbit can help a local government recover from cyberattacks, hurricanes and outages.

Lonestar Data Holdings, which does business as Lonestar Space, announced the partnership on Nov. 3. The company said work is underway to prepare selected city data for the first orbiting data storage system in the StarVault network, which is scheduled to launch in April 2027.

How the Pilot Works

According to the announcement, the city’s Innovation & Technology Department will work with Lonestar to add space-based storage to Coral Gables’ existing backup systems. The pilot does not replace those systems. It adds what the company describes as “a physically independent storage layer in space.”

The pitch rests on a weakness that many IT teams know well. As the release puts it, “A cyberattack can disable both an organization’s systems and the safeguards it needs to respond.” Lonestar says that risk is growing as AI speeds up attacks.

The pilot has three main pieces:

• Recovery data: Through Lonestar’s StarSafe and StarKey services, the pilot will protect critical information and digital security keys the city would need to restore services after a major disruption. That data can be updated over time.
• Heritage archive: Selected historical and cultural records will be preserved in a Coral Gables Digital Heritage Archive.
• City control: Coral Gables will keep sovereignty over its data, including ownership and control over who can access it and when it can be recovered.

“A city’s data holds both its memory and the foundations of its future,” said Chris Stott, Lonestar Space’s founder and chairman. “Coral Gables is helping us bring space infrastructure into the everyday work of protecting communities.”

Why a Florida City Would Want This

For a South Florida municipality, the hurricane angle is not abstract. Lonestar says StarVault is designed to help protect essential information from “cyber threats, hurricanes and infrastructure outages,” the kinds of events that can take out local data centers and the networks that connect them at the same time.

The idea is the same one behind every off-site backup: keep a copy somewhere that the same disaster cannot reach. Lonestar’s version just moves “off-site” into low Earth orbit.

The pilot is a test, not a long-term contract. The company said a successful pilot “would pave the way for an ongoing partnership,” expanding the city’s use of space-based data protection.

The relationship had been in the works for weeks. Coral Gables’ City Commission agenda for Sept. 29 included a presentation on Lonestar’s lunar and space-based data backup and recovery service, sponsored by Mayor Vince Lago, according to the meeting record.

A Company With Lunar Ambitions

Lonestar has been chasing the idea of off-planet data storage for years. In February 2025, Data Center Dynamics reported that the company launched a small hardware payload, an 8TB SSD and a single FPGA chip, aboard Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander to test how data storage behaves on the Moon. The company said at the time that it hoped eventually to deploy full data centers as a form of disaster recovery for Earth.

In its latest announcement, Lonestar says it has flight heritage spanning the International Space Station and the Moon, and that it is building StarVault starting in low Earth orbit for governments and enterprises.

The Talent Angle

The partnership also has a local education piece. According to Lonestar, the collaboration will create opportunities for community engagement, science and technology education and research through the city’s Smart City Research Lab and Gables Tech Tank community partners.

That lab is already a real pipeline. The city’s Smart City Research Lab page says more than 170 interns and resident researchers had participated as of 2025, working on projects in AI, IoT sensors, digital twins, drones and full-stack development. Many of the tools they build are in use across city departments.

Why It Matters for Miami Tech

Coral Gables already markets itself as a tech-forward city government; its IT department lists recognitions such as a 2026 Smart 20 Award and Intelligent Community certification for 2025 to 2027. Signing on as a Founding City Partner for a space-based storage network adds to that profile, and gives local students and founders a close look at an emerging corner of the space economy.

For South Florida businesses, the bigger takeaway is about resilience. Cyberattacks, storms and outages are already part of the planning conversation for companies across the region. Whether or not orbit becomes a normal place to keep backups, the pilot is a reminder that having a recovery copy no single disaster can reach is becoming a basic part of doing business.

The real test comes next spring, when the first StarVault storage system is scheduled to launch.