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An astronaut wandering the moon next year could use a smartphone to call home. A German startup is preparing to set up the first telecommunication infrastructure on the lunar surface.
The German company Part Time Scientists, which originally competed for the Google Lunar X Prize race to the moon, plans to send a lander with a rover in late 2018 to visit the landing site of Apollo 17. (Launched in 1972, this was NASA's final Apollo mission to the moon.) Instead of using a complex dedicated telecommunication system to relay data from the rover to the Earth, the company will rely on LTE technology — the same system used on Earth for mobile phone communications.
"We are cooperating with Vodafone in order to provide LTE base stations on the moon," Karsten Becker, who heads embedded electronics development and integration for the startup, told Space.com.
Try to get free bandwidth on the Moon, I dare you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)
It gets worse. TFA quotes the startup idiot as saying they plan to do video chat from the moon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @08:54PM
Live video chat between earth and moon is certainly practical. It will be noticably laggy which will make talking annoying but nothing that can't be solved by social conventions, similar to what you might see on a live news broadcast with remote interviewees.
The base station on the moon won't using LTE to communicate with the earth, that part is for the handset-base station link. Then there will presumably be some sort of communications relay, probably involving at least one earth-orbiting satellites too so it can work throughout the day.