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: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday August 11 2017, @08:38PM
The only things scheduled to land on the Moon in the near term [wikipedia.org], not counting this project, are the Lunar X Prize missions, China's Chang'e landers, India's Chandrayaan-2, Japan's SLIM, and another private lander from Astrobotic Technology in 2019.
People definitely want the Apollo landing sites to remain undisturbed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lunar_X_Prize#Objections_to_the_Heritage_Bonus_Prizes [wikipedia.org]
https://www.engadget.com/2012/05/25/x-prize-adopts-nasa-guidelines-protecting-lunar-heritage-sites/ [engadget.com]
https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/617743main_NASA-USG_LUNAR_HISTORIC_SITES_RevA-508.pdf [nasa.gov]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-20/the-battle-for-the-moon-begins [bloomberg.com]
Such recommendations are not law, but it seems unlikely that anybody is going to disturb the sites. If they did do so, I don't see them being punished in any meaningful way, especially if it is a nation state and not a U.S. corporation.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]