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posted by Fnord666 on Friday August 11 2017, @05:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the can-you-hear-me-now? dept.

Can you hear me now?

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @09:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2017, @09:24PM (#552594)

    Yes I did now let me switch LTE providers from Sprint to T-Mobile.

    2.5 Mbps of free bandwidth from T-Mobile. Verily I am living the dream.