Should we build a supercomputer on the moon? It would be a mammoth technical undertaking, but a University of Southern California graduate student thinks there’s a very good reason for doing this: It would help alleviate a coming deep-space network traffic jam that’s had NASA scientists worried for several years now, reports Robert McMillan at Wired Enterprise.

Ouliang Chang floated his lunar supercomputer idea a few weeks ago at a space conference in Pasadena, California. The plan is to bury a massive machine in a deep dark crater, on the side of the moon that’s facing away from Earth and all of its electromagnetic chatter. Nuclear-powered, it would process data for space missions and slingshot Earth’s Deep Space Network into a brand new moon-centric era. “Once the physical infrastructure backbone is laid out, I suspect it would look much like the monolith excavation site in Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,” says Chang’s course supervisor Madhu Thangavelu, of USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The Deep Space Network is a network of 13 giant antennas located in the U.S., Australia, and Spain that gather data and talk to spacecraft in, well, deep space. These space missions are already fighting for bandwidth on this overloaded network and most of the data has to get back to Earth for processing. With a lunar supercomputer, Chang says, that could change. His supercomputer would run in frigid regions near one of the moon’s poles. The cold temperatures would make cooling the supercomputer easier, and allow it to use super-efficient superconductive materials to move around electricity. Although it’s not clear how much water could be found on the moon’s poles, Chang envisions a water-cooled supercomputer.

Why? Space scientists are worried that the existing Deep Space Network hardware is obsolete and just not up to the job of transmitting the growing workload of extra-terrestrial data, McMillan reports. The U.S. space agency is going to have to come up with a plan, the scientists said.

How will the get the number-crunching power transmitted back to Planet Earth. Hint: It involves lasers.

Have a read of the full report at Wired Enterprise and have your say: Is the Deep Space network holding back extra-terrestrial exploration, or will it anytime soon? And what do you make of putting such computing power on the moon? Great idea that will never fly? Or not ready for prime time from the get-go?