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Moon Space NASA Wireless Networking Hardware

NASA Plans Lunar Mobile Phone Network 164

Posted by samzenpus from the dark-side-of-the-moon-minutes-cost-more-money dept.
If NASA and the British National Space Centre succeed in their 'MoonLite mission' you won't be able to say, "In space no one can hear your ringtone." They plan on building a satellite system/phone network that would provide full four-bar signal coverage for colonists living in the base NASA wants to build at the south pole of the moon after 2020.
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NASA Plans Lunar Mobile Phone Network More

NASA Plans Lunar Mobile Phone Network

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:36PM (#22476880)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I hesistate to think of what Alpha Moonbase's phone bill would look like by now.
    • Never. Gonna. Happen.

      Any takers for a bet that this won't even be in the (serious) planning stage in 2020?

    • Will I have to SIM-unlock my iPhone to use it on the moon?
    • I wonder if there is a block of IP addresses reserved for extraterrestrial use.

  • What are the data rates (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Joe The Dragon ( 967727 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:36PM (#22476894)
    $20+ a meg and $5 a text and $100 for 60 min of talk time

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by c_forq ( 924234 )
      yeah, but I think that will come out to .02 a meg, .005 a text, and .1 for 60 minutes of talk in the petro-dollars we will be using in 2020.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Dr. Eggman ( 932300 )
      Tell me the 60 min of "talk time" doesn't include the wasted time spent waiting for the message to reach the moon, get a response and head back.

      I could see it as something of a quarky attraction "talk to the moon: call 2-XXX...) to help fund research. But really what colonist is going to want to be in the middle of digging up dirt only to stop and answer a phone with some silly questions like "what's the weather like up there?"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        One thing is for sure: the ~2.51 second round trip latency (surface to surface) would be make speakerphone use impractical since you normally have to stop talking when somebody else is talking because they can't hear you anyway. That much latency would get old fast.

    • Blackberry data rates already approach your $20.. my plan is one of the cheaper ones my carrier provides, and it's 8 dollars a meg for traffic.. the more expensive plan is $12 a meg.
    • Standard non-plan GSM data rate in Canada is 5c per kilobyte. So $50/meg. We have some of the least competition and most outrageous cell-phone prices in the world.

  • Figures... (Score:5, Funny)

    by framauro13 ( 1148721 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:38PM (#22476914)
    Great. The Moon will have better coverage than my current Sprint plan. I bet their data plan will be cheaper too.

  • In space (Score:5, Funny)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:38PM (#22476916) Homepage Journal
    noone can hear you now!
    • Never underestimate the bandwidth of a lunar buggy full of Post-It Notes hurtling down the terminator line.

  • 4 bars? (Score:5, Funny)

    by KublaiKhan ( 522918 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:39PM (#22476942) Homepage Journal
    There's only going to be four bars to provide coverage on the moon?

    It had better be a small colony, then. Or they'd better be really big bars, hopefully without annoyingly trendy kitsch, and hopefully with some really good whiskey.
  • Revive the program with proper budgeting and set up a colony.

    Unless you want to sell AnyTime Lunar Minutes to other countries that would already be there.

  • GSM or CDMA?

    (I had to ask)

  • Lagggg (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NewbieProgrammerMan ( 558327 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:41PM (#22476980)
    I wonder how long it takes your brain to adapt to talking to somebody when there's a 1-second+ delay each way? I've had conversations via satellite that seemed to have about a 1/2 second round-trip delay, and it was annoying as hell for the first few minutes.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mcsqueak ( 1043736 )
      I think you'd just have to take more time and be more thoughtful about cutting someone off, getting exciting and interjecting a comment randomly, etc... all the stuff people normally do in conversations. Hey, if I were a colonist I'd take a 1+ second voice delay over only being able to use email to communicate with friends/family back on Earth.
    • Well, my brother in law lives in the UK and whenever he phones - depending on the quality of the line (I live in South Africa) - we often get 1sec+ delays during conversations. Often the conversation disintegrates into "Huh?"Yeah I was say...""Oh, sorry...""Hold on you go first" pause "Right as I was saying..."

      You have to learn to listen until the other person has finished saying what they were saying before replying. It's actually good for conversing because you are forced to really listening to the other
      • Roger. Your turn. Over.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Aladrin ( 926209 )
        Yeah, I've had internet voice chats go the same way... 2 seconds is pretty painful at first, but you get used to it. I'd have a hard time bitching about it if I were talking to someone on the moon... Or even if I were on the moon talking to someone back home.
    • Clearly you never used Netmeeting or any of the various crap softphones that came out back in the dialup days. :)

  • Unless Obama wins (Score:5, Informative)

    by MagPulse ( 316 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:41PM (#22476984)
    He'll delay Constellation for five years (pdf link, go to the last page) [barackobama.com], which will result in layoffs for all the people we'd need to get to the moon, and then we'll have to go try to re-hire them. Meanwhile the designs are being done now, so the plans will just sit for 5 years going out of date. Brilliant. And what will the money be used for? Saving no child left behind. Yes, let's dump more money in to education, that will fix it.

    • He'll delay Constellation for five years

      Has any candidate committed to funding it? I haven't heard anyone talking up NASA lately. McCain said we may have a military presence in Iraq for another 100 years, which would tie up a fair amount of money - and don't forget he just made a Bush41-style "no new taxes" pledge this week.

      layoffs for all the people we'd need to get to the moon, and then we'll have to go try to re-hire them

      I don't know who else is hiring these people right now - after all there is hardly anyone currently working who can claim experience with lunar missions. While I wouldn't want to see them lose their jobs any more th

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by MagPulse ( 316 )
        As opposed to, sadly, Hillary:

        Senator Clinton does not support delaying the Constellation program and intends to maintain American leadership in space exploration.
        -Washington Post [washingtonpost.com]

      • There aren't many choices on this issue, really. Considering Bush's "no child left behind" was absurdly underfunded when it was passed, there are pretty much only two choices:
        Increase the funding to where it should be (and be attacked for spending too much)
        Kill it completely where it stands (and be attacked for being anti-child)
        Why is "kill it completely where it stands (and be hailed for saving children from that horrific fucking monstrosity)" not an option?

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by damn_registrars ( 1103043 )

          Why is "kill it completely where it stands (and be hailed for saving children from that horrific fucking monstrosity)" not an option?

          An excellent question.

          One only has to refer to the impact of the right-wing noise machine to see the answer. After all, it was the conservatives that created this monster, and they control the loudest of the media outlets. If one were to kill off "no child left behind", the right-wing media would jump all over it and label the people behind its killing as being "anti-child", "anti-education", "anti-progress", "anti-jesus", and of course "anti-america" and hence "anti-patriotic".

          Hell, just look

          • There may be some flaws with NCLB, but for the most part all I've heard so far since it's inception is AFT/NEA whining that the universally administered, standardized tests are somehow bad, with no alternate suggestion as to how to evaluate schools' and teachers' performance, and more importantly as to how to encourage good performance.

            Claims that teachers are neglecting other areas and "teaching to the test" are bandied about, failing to consider (or deliberately glossing over) that the problem the testing
            • I think the problem is that having more tests in school does nothing to improve education. What happens is that people learn to pass the test and nothing else.
    • If a design is good now, why is it not good in 5 years? For a mission critical application looking for 9-9s, the last thing you want is bleeding edge. You want established, reliable hardware that is predictable. No amount of testing can replace an extra 5 years of shake and bake by the rest of industry.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Dachannien ( 617929 )
        Unless/until private groups start getting interested in moon missions, the design will be bleeding edge no matter how long you wait. The difference in waiting five years includes that (a) it will need to be updated to work with any developed advancements in materials science in the interim, and (b) you'll likely have to get a bunch of new people familiarized with the old designs once you pick things back up.

        • I do not think there is anything bleeding edge about a Sataurn V. Yes, the complete system that will be built will be bleeding edge. By no means am I implying you can go down to the corner store and grab a command module off the shelf. No matter how advanced a system you are building, if it goes into space its individual parts must be ruggededized, and if a part ruggedized it is not going to be bleeding edge. "You want established, reliable hardware that is predictable." You want to build your bleeding

    • Re:Unless Obama wins (Score:4, Insightful)

      by llZENll ( 545605 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:40PM (#22477940)
      Project Constellation overall is a great idea, but building a moonbase is probably a bad idea.

      He also argues that a Moon base is a poor use of resources, since "science can be done for far less money by robotic missions--which also don't put human lives at risk."[5] The Los Angeles Times seconded that in an editorial, saying "Manned moon flight may appeal to baby boomers, but it makes little scientific sense for most space missions these days. Robots can now perform, or be developed to perform, most of the tasks people would do at a moon station." [6]

      Columnist Gregg Easterbrook has criticized the plans as a poor use of resources. He writes that

      Although, of course, the base could yield a great discovery, its scientific value is likely to be small while its price is extremely high. Worse, moon-base nonsense may for decades divert NASA resources from the agency's legitimate missions, draining funding from real needs in order to construct human history's silliest white elephant. [7]

      According to Easterbrook, the billions of dollars that a lunar colony might cost should instead be devoted to exploring the solar system with space probes; space observatories; and protecting the Earth from Near-Earth asteroids.

      - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_outpost_(NASA) [wikipedia.org]
    • Hm. Cell phone service on the moon vs. education for our nation's youth. Is that really a tough choice?

      Btw: why is NASA solving this at all? Shouldn't it be whomever would be the cell provider for the moon, and then we can let the free market figure it out?

    • Re:Unless Obama wins (Score:4, Insightful)

      by imipak ( 254310 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @03:01PM (#22479148) Journal
      yeah, right, 'cos the current regime have been just showering money on NASA [universetoday.com], right? Why, it's almost as if Dubya announced a pie in the sky plan at some far-off-date just far enough ahead that it'll have to be Democrat decision that, sorry, actually you've already spent the NASA Mars budget a few thousand times over in Iraq [planetary.org]. (Note that that Planetary Society "success!" press release is about their (ok, our - I'm a member) getting existing funding for space science restored, after it was slashed to try to make up the increasing void between the directive "go back to the moon" and the reality that it costs money to make and fly spaceships and train astronauts. Lots and lots and lots of it, actually.)

      Many of us don't think the gee-whizz eye-candy coolness factor of watching someone bounce round the moon on TV is actually worth the enormous opportunity cost of what could have been done with that money if it wasn't wasted on manned missions. The Shuttle's landing tomorrow morning after a ten day mission that cost $1.3 billion. Consider that the incredibly successful Mars Exploration Rovers cost less than half that over the entire four years and counting mission, and have made fantastic breakthrough scientific discoveries as well as producing some amazing [flickr.com] eye-candy [usyd.edu.au].

      (And incidentally those are all "amateur" images produced from the raw data stream, thanks to JPL/Cornell/Steve Squyres' wonderful policy to release it as it arrives [exploratorium.edu].)

    • Would you prefer us to start recruiting our American rocket scientists from China and India in another 5 years? Without focus on a better education system, the United states will continue to fall behind. 5 years is a small cost to pay for catching us back up and getting the next generation competitive in the global market.
  • Given that any moonbase (aren't they putting the cart before the horse here?) will be largely metal, will the signal get through.

    Let's see who trumps this one by offering a 5 bar service for Mars.

  • Dammit. I just heard yesterday that Verizon has completely run out of places to have that guy ask if the person on the other end of the line can hear him now.

    NASA, you have just brought us at least another two months of pain.
  • We're the only provider on the planet my friend.

    But, we do offer the Android. Not the google one, a real one ;)

  • Can you hear me now? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cheza ( 1242376 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:46PM (#22477070)
    This is great, I'll be able to place a call on the moon but I still can't place one in my house.
  • I'm sure the engineers behind the concept are thinking in terms of watts per sq meter, or whatever unit is used to express the actual amount of signal that will be available to the future colonists. And I guess "bars" is a nice, non-technical term, like "Size of Texas" and "Volume of the Library of Congress".

    But at least I can look up the size of Texas and the volume of the LoC, and I can even take a guess as to the length of a Fortnight. "Bar" is an utterly meaningless and arbitrary measurement. Heck, m
  • Do we currently have satellites orbiting the moon? Or would these be the first satellites for our main satellite?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      The problem is that the Moon has a "lumpy" gravitational field, which makes it difficult to keep satellites in stable lunar orbits.

  • Oh, the heck with it. (Score:4, Funny)

    by arizwebfoot ( 1228544 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:56PM (#22477248)
    Now the Moon will another place I can't hide from the ex.

  • "In space no one can hear your ringtone." (Score:3, Informative)

    by HTH NE1 ( 675604 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:57PM (#22477260)

    "In space no one can hear your ringtone."
    That's an essential reason for being able to set your phone to vibrate.

  • This is actually a very clever plan (Score:4, Funny)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @12:57PM (#22477266)
    Hopefully it will answer once and for all, the question about whether there's intelligent life out there.

    As soon as there's any hint of a mobile phone mast getting installed all the NIMBY's start moaning, writing to their MP's, holding protests and petitioning the phone company.

    If there is life on other planets, all we have to do to find it is to announce that someone will errect a mobile mast - then just wait for the protests from the aliens. No protests means we are truly alone, afterall.

  • UK has been sitting out of the manned missions and are now looking at how to get in on the game. They were talking about building units for the ISS, but that really seems like a waste. Far better for them to focus on doing things that others have not done, or have not done decently. It would be interesting to see if they would pursue such items as a fuel depot.

  • That's no moon. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly ( 844560 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:05PM (#22477384) Homepage Journal
    It's a base station! [wikipedia.org]
  • I mean what's the point of being a colonist if your in-laws can still phone you ?
  • Oh, I so hope that it's ATT so that when I move there to be a colonist I can bring my iPhone! That would be so totally cool!

  • HELLO! I'M ON THE MOON! (Score:4, Funny)

    by damburger ( 981828 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:24PM (#22477674)

    NO, ITS SHIT!

    Sorry, had to be done.

  • Oh yeah? (Score:3, Funny)

    by binaryspiral ( 784263 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:27PM (#22477726)
    I have the Ted Kennedy phone coverage plan... they claim "more bars everywhere".

  • 4 bars on the moon (Score:3, Funny)

    by kellyb9 ( 954229 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:31PM (#22477796)
    4 bars on the moon?! somehow, I know I'm getting screwed when I would get better service on the moon than I would at my house.
  • I sincerely hope that the "mobile phone network" concept is the result of bad journalism rather than bad thinking. There are historical reasons for the development of telcom concepts in their current form; but the idea of transplanting them to an area not bound by legacy infrastructure is just pathetic. Are we still going to be separating "voice" and "data" in space? Will "SMS" still be a special kind of data thousands of times more expensive than the normal stuff? What times qualify as "nights and weekends

  • A little.... Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)

    by EdIII ( 1114411 ) * on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:42PM (#22477972)
    I don't mean to troll, I really don't, but this just seems to be an incredibly stupid waste of resources.

    I don't see it working that well due to the lag, and the costs are incredible.

    Are we really trying to put bandwidth (that is what is essentially being done) on the Moon?

    Isn't the whole reason why we are having problems with bandwidth/transfer caps in the US due to a lack of bandwidth? Maybe we should be investing in our infrastructures at home and solving the problems we have here with our current bandwidth before trying to place some incredibly expensive bandwidth on the moon for possible colonists.

    Now I understand this might be done for national pride, just like the space race in the 60's. Are we really going to have that much pride that we were the first to offer cellphone service on the Moon?

  • brilliant (Score:5, Funny)

    by nguy ( 1207026 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @01:43PM (#22477980)
    First, NASA tricks AT&T in setting up a cell phone network on the moon, then, in order to recoup their investment, AT&T must somehow get the moon colonized.
  • I will make millions selling sex.moon domain... astronaut porn is even kinkier than German shizer.

  • Wow (Score:4, Funny)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @02:05PM (#22478264)
    "Guess where *I'm* calling from!"
  • Perhaps the astronauts use the mosquito [wikipedia.org] ringtone to prevent those pesky grown up ground controllers from knowing when a text message with the answer rings through...

  • Bummer (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tarlus ( 1000874 ) on Tuesday February 19, 2008 @02:09PM (#22478334)

    ...you won't be able to say, "In space no one can hear your ringtone."
    Well that's a damn shame, considering how everyone uses that phrase all the time.
  • "four-bar signal"

    As everybody knows foobar is the UNIVERSAL unwritten standard.
  • Not many voters took this moon program seriously and no-one wants to fund it further.

    Barrak wrote:

    > the next president needs to have "a practical sense of what
    > investments deliver the most scientific and technological
    > spinoffs -- and not just assume that human space
    > exploration, actually sending bodies into space, is always
    > the best investment.

  • In order to minimize the visual impact of the cell towers, AT&T has pledged to disgiuse them as trees.

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