After winning a contract from NASA in the wake of Project Artemis, could Finnish mobile phone company Nokia be the first one to provide mobile phone coverage on the Moon?
By: Ringo Bones
After winning a contract bid and granted by NASA $14.1-million to build the first ever 4G mobile phone networks on the Moon, it seems that the Finnish mobile phone company Nokia could be the first ever to establish a working 4G mobile phone network on the Moon that would be used by astronauts. In the wake of NASA’s Artemis Project that aims to land the first woman and the next man on the Moon by 2024 (and about time, given that the last time NASA sent a men to the Moon was back in 1972). By 2028, NASA hopes to have the beginnings of a working lunar base and, ultimately, a sustainable human presence.
If NASA’s current timetable goes as planned, Nokia says that their Lunar 4G Network will be completed by late 2022, with humans due to arrive shortly after in 2024 as part of NASA’s Project Artemis. Nokia decided to choose to establish a 4G network first because given its long track record has proven reliability and robustness in the previous years, although Nokia says that it already has plans for 5G purpose built for space applications in the near future.
Nokia says the proposed 4G network will provide connectivity for any activity that astronauts need to carry out on the Moon, including using the network for transmitting biometric data, remotely controlling autonomous exploratory lunar rovers, streaming high-definition video in order to allay the concerns of “Moon Landing Hoax Conspiracy Theorists”, and enabling voice and video communications. Although how all of this will work with the expected one and a quarter second travel time delay of the radio waves between the Earth and the Moon is yet to be determined given that the 186,000 miles per second speed of the radio waves still have to travel a quarter of a million miles to the Moon and back to Earth again. And let us also hope that the “roaming charges” does not carry an astronomical price tag.
