NASA Funds Nokia Plan To Provide Cellular Service On Moon (upi.com) 65
schwit1 shares a report from UPI: NASA will fund a project by Nokia to build a 4G cellular communication network on the moon with $14.1 million, the space agency announced. That project was part of $370 million in new contracts for lunar surface research missions NASA announced Wednesday. Most of the money went to large space companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance to perfect techniques to make and handle rocket propellant in space. The space agency must quickly develop new technologies for living and working on the moon if it wants to realize its goal to have astronauts working at a lunar base by 2028, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a live broadcast.
Aim for the moon, not mars. (Score:1)
I don't know why more people aren't trying for the moon instead of mars. Small steps seem to make considerably more sense rather than something as ambitious as mars. Plus, you get to learn all the stuff that's not going to work too great with being (reasonably) close to home should something in your plan not go too sellar (pun intended).
Re: Aim for the moon, not mars. (Score:1)
Because we already were there, half a century ago. And we don't like to feel like we're stagnating,
or failed as a generation. Even tough we definitely did drop the ball. If you mean on your foot and by ball you mean harpoon.
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"Your grandfather was the one guy who ever rowed to that island you can see, once before, he said it was boring and nobody has ever been back since. You need to shoot for that continent, 8 x further away over the horizon that nobody's ever gone to, just behind that island, but why would you bother to go back to the island?"
The Moon is a good staging post, if nothing else. Launch to the Moon, and then from the Moon to Mars when you have enough equipment. Then no HUGE single launches, lots of little routin
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gather up for a big launch from the (much easier) Moon, which is already 1/8th the way to your destination.
1) It's nowhere near one 1/8th the way.
2) From the mechanical energy perspective, the Moon is more distant from Earth than even Mars.
3) Launching from LEO is even easier than launching from the Moon.
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>The Moon is a good staging post, if nothing else.
Not really. You launch stuff into orbit, then use more energy to land it on the moon, then more energy to launch it back into orbit? Why not just leave it in orbit to begin? If you really want to combine cargo, make your ships capable of docking with each other in orbit. That'll also keep your clear of all that highly abrasive lunar dust.
It's also not much good as a stash - you don't make your only stash 2 days into an 8-month journey. And again, you
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In terms of Space Flight, We have stagnated.
Yes they are number of improvements in Space Travel Technology, and robotics that allows us to explore the Solar System better than ever. However the goal of getting off this planet and making a living in the new frontier seems to be considered a fools mission.
Because for the last 40 years, we have been fixated on the Economy as the only thing that matters in the world. A strong economy doesn't equal success however it is a tool towards reaching success. Some o
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NASA has one of the best multiplier effects of any government agency, it's over 7 dollars created in the economy for every 1 spent. Gerard O'Neil had one of his classes figure out the ROI for Apollo. To everyone's surprise (including his) they found that JUST the taxes on JUST the improvements in JUST the telecom industry would have paid for everything from Gemini to Apollo 17 by the early 1980s.
If these assholes actually wanted to "run government like a business" they'd be plowing truckloads of money int
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I don't know why more people aren't trying for the moon instead of mars.
Because we can't grow a colony with plants and people on the Moon. No carbon or nitrogen.available.
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Indeed - unlimited, nearly-pure CO2 delivered to your doorstep anywhere on Mars, already in the optimal form for plants to turn into all manner of useful materials. You couldn't ask for a better carbon source, just pressurize and use.
Nitrogen would be a little more annoying, we'd have to concentrate it out of the atmosphere somehow, but that's old technology at this point. We can even extract a useful amount of water out of the air - I believe one of the missions currently en-route actually has a proof-o
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Actually a large space station will require a lunar colony first, since that's where most of the raw materials are going to have to come from.
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That can be shipped from the Earth to the Moon. I don't see us making the Moon a colony. But more of a work base. It may be impossible to make it self sustainable, and allow for population growth, without regular shipments from earth. However it could in theory be the size of a small city (HUGE In engineering terms) and support perhaps 10,000 people, for years at a time. But it would need to be very carefully managed, no families, supply is fixed, so demand will need to be controlled. It will not be an e
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Why no families? You just have to maintain zero population growth - and by the time we're building Moon cities we will have hopefully driven that point home on Earth as well. At any rate it will probably be the more prosperous nations developing the moon, and the prosperous nations pretty much already all have negative growth rates anyway (excluding immigration)
And of course, just because there's no ubiquitous carbon or nitrogen (or water) on the moon doesn't mean it's not there at all. Carbon should be
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Fair enough, so long as it's just an industrial outpost. But outposts have a way of becoming cities if it's at all feasible. And if basic ecological elements can be found on the moon, that's likely to happen. At least assuming children don't suffer debilitating developmental problems from the low gravity. And if there's children growing up there, they'll quite likely be unable to ever visit Earth, which gives them and their families a huge incentive to establish a (mostly) self-sufficient colony.
Mars wi
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There's not a lot of interest on the Moon. The main reason NASA wants to go back is to act as a gateway to Mars.
Mars has enough resources to live on permanently without relying on Earth, eventually. If we can create a colony up there it gives us security in case something happens to the Earth, like another asteroid or some self inflicted disaster.
Mars is also a driver of new technology, both for long duration long distance manned spaceflight and for living on another world.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Possibly useful eventually. Not much good now, and with luck we'll mostly bypass helium fusion altogether in favor of aneutronic p-B fusion.
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Oxygen.
The moon is pretty useless as a physical gateway to Mars - stopping at the moon takes considerably more energy than just going straight to Mars. At best it offers a gravitational slingshot, in which case you're moving too fast as you pass to do anything more than wave. About the only way the Lunar Gateway is of any use getting to Mars is as a nearby technology testbed, just far enough away that we need to dramatically improve our space-traveling technologies (reliable orbital refueling at the least
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It's because the budgets for space programs are set by lawyers and bankers masquerading as political figures, rather than by engineers and explorers. If NASA had kept the same paltry 4.5% of the US budget that they had at the height of Apollo they planned to open the first **permanent** lunar base by 1984. Instead we have the situation where last year the official Pentagon budget (not counting the Black Budget, intel agencies, mercenaries employed by State, etc.) was larger than all NASA budgets since its
PSA: turn off roaming during the flight (Score:5, Funny)
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Your bills are going to be out of this world!
Anyhow, isn't 4G kinda old, by the time it's all said and done 5G would be common and we'd be looking at 6G and 4G would be getting deprecated?
Of course, I can see why you wouldn't want to do 5G there, because you might accidentally transmit the virus to the moon. But then again, don't towers burn prettier on the moon?
moon base by 2028? (Score:2, Insightful)
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That's okay, they're going with 4G to make sure it's obsolete before the project starts.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Low Budget? (Score:3)
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Re: Low Budget? (Score:2)
Hello. You have reached profit enterprises!
For businesses, add one zero...
For government, add two zeroes...
For millitary, add three zeroes...
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Maybe this is just me, but the price tag here seems very low. We can't even build a government building for $14M, but we're going to have reliable communications with the moon?
It's not just you because it's not intended to actually install anything at all on the Lunar surface. NASA is scattering seed money to the winds in an effort to get corporations thinking about Luna who don't traditionally consider themselves space related. They expect to get nothing back but a pile of paper as proof of that thought. That's all.
Jim Bridenstine is a True Believer in capitalist systems, and as with all such Believers, he drastically underestimates the influence of other motivations. He's t
2028 wonâ(TM)t happen. (Score:2)
By then, President Lytherallaye Heat l' Aire will have replaced President Token van Goodcop, canceling the last remains of scraps the education and science comnunity got, and even researching hair loss and erections "on the moon" won't be possible anymore.
5G (Score:2)
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At least the 5G masts won't be set on fire.
Sure, because there won't be any, it's a 4G network. Otherwise, you can still have fires in space, but you have to bring your own oxidizer.
Nokia going to the Moon? Understandable (Score:2)
Nokia's real goal is to run as far as possible to prevent another "successful" Microsoft acquisition of Nokia.
Project codename: Elope from Elop
New day same story (Score:2)
Can you hear me now? (Score:2)
Nope.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Score:2)
The space agency must quickly develop new technologies for living
Gotta have wifi, gotta have wifi first
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IoT will be orders of magnitude more important there than on Earth, since every aspect of the environment has to be monitored all the time.
About time! (Score:1)
The roof (Score:1)
Honey, what are you doing on the roof?
Trying to get a signal, dear.
Phone home! (Score:2)
I wonder if it's going to be similar to this [youtube.com].
And astronauts will get calls like this... (Score:4, Funny)
"We're calling about the extended warranty on your lunar rover..."
Really? (Score:2)
What's next, communicating with the dead? It's gonna be a long long time before anyone needs cell service on the moon. A long long long long time. The chances of Nokia even existing by then are slim to none.
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It'd be really nice if all those lunar rovers and other robots had a reliable, standardized communication network connecting them to each other and the people operating them. Ditto for the occasional human explorers. The sort of thing where you don't need any specialty hardware, just slap a standard, thoroughly tested and mature 4G tranceiver into your system and you're good to go. Let the engineers focus on the challenging stuff.
Good news everyone! (Score:1)
If you are aiming for the moon ... (Score:2)
Re:If you are aiming for the moon ... (Score:4, Informative)
If you are aiming for the moon, literally, can't you at least go with 5G rather than 4G?
I'll take this as a serious question so here goes:
4g uses less power than 5g unless you're going full bore on the link. Meaning uploading a little here, a little there, 5g is less efficient.
4g has a range of 10 miles. 5g has a range of 1000 feet.
4g gives up to 200mbps, 5g has a theoretical 10gb speed
The advantages of speed don't really overcome the limitations of power and distance.
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Why?
4G is mature and well-tested commodity hardware that's not going anywhere anytime soon. And with a relatively tiny number of communication nodes on the moon, the per-node bandwidth will be ridiculous. By the time a 4G network starts reaching capacity, we'll likely have a Lunar Starlink-style orbital network in place to provide reliable communication from virtually anywhere on the surface.
Bring it on home (Score:3)
Before you start putting cell service on the Moon, do you think we could get some cell service and broadband here in this rural area of the Blue Ridge Mountains?
There are about 15 million people in the United States who don't have any access to broadband and can barely get a cell signal.
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And you won't be getting it from the cellular companies. Mountains are terrible places for ground-based networks - installing towers is far more labor intensive, and even if you put towers on the peaks they can generally only reach the next ridge over before the mountains start casting huge deadzone shadows. Which means you need a lot more towers per square mile, while also having a lot fewer people per square mile. All of which adds up to them needing to charge truly outrageous prices (likely 10-50x nor
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If I could get fiber or even cable internet, I wouldn't need cell service. Services like Google Fi take away my need for a cell signal. There are similar places right across the state line where local r
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>If I could get fiber or even cable internet, I wouldn't need cell service.
Great, so get together with your municipality and help pass the motions and pay the taxes that would be required to run your own fiber, or incentivize some company to do it for you. It's certainly an option. You might actually find it cheaper to set up you own cell towers though - rural (I'm assuming) infrastructure is *expensive* (per capita) since the people-per-mile concentration is so low.
>There is no Starlink service to
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We're trying, believe me. We had some telecom engineers out here a few weeks ago to do a second assessment. There's fiber right over the next hill. We're willing to spend the money and donate some land for the right-of-way and found a cell company who would put up a tower if we give them an easement. But everything takes for
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Meanwhile, literally NOBODY on the Moon can get a signal
Hi..Have you ever tried Virtual sex? (Score:1)
Coding nightmare (Score:1)
You heard it here first. If/when we expand our global tech infrastructure to the Moon, we will experience a coding nightmare having to do with Einstein's theory of relativity.
Gravity affects the speed of clocks. Clocks on the Moon will run slightly faster than clocks on Earth. The difference will be incredibly tiny but all that code designed to handle cellular communications is gonna have to be patched... oiy vey