Commentary

MoonLite, Moon Bright: NASA To Build Wireless Phone Network On The Moon

Yes, you read that correctly. NASA and the British National Space Centre are working together to develop a mobile phone system for the colony that will eventually inhabit the moon. Say what?!?

Yes, you read that correctly. NASA and the British National Space Centre are working together to develop a mobile phone system for the colony that will eventually inhabit the moon. Say what?!?You did know about the plans to colonize the moon, right? It's been on the road map to space for some time now. Of course, the colony will be made up of scientists performing all sorts of low gravity experiments, such as seeing who can putt a golf ball the furthest. Since radio waves are the easiest way to communicate in the vacuum, all those golfers will be using radio systems to say useful things like: "Ha, beat that one, George!"

OK, kidding aside. NASA is looking to build a colony at the south pole of the moon sometime after 2020. Using a system of satellites, NASA and BNSC plan to bounce radio signals around the orb to transmit voice and text messages between colonists and robots. (I am really not making this up.) The system is to be called MoonLite, and could pass information all around the moon as well as back to earth.


More Mobility Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

The system, says David Parker, director of space science at the BNSC, will resemble the "satellite phone network of the 1980s and 1990s on Earth. The robots and astronauts would be spread out from the base to do exploration and some sorts of comms infrastructure would be needed. MoonLite is taking the first step toward that network."

Not only will the system be able to direct voice calls, but data as well. If you think the colonists of 2020 are going to get 3G, forget it. The data throughput will be a lowly 3 Kbps for the downlink and up to 2 Kbps for the uplink. That's miserable. Let's hope speediness of data communications isn't essential on the moon. By way of comparison, GPRS can transit data at about 80 Kbps under optimal circumstances and EDGE can receive info at 200 Kbps. HSPA transits data at speeds up to 14.4 megabits per second.

Of course, none of this has been approved by Congress. What do you think? Is it a valuable way to spend taxpayer dollars?


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links