Phone calls have officially taken the first step towards going interstellar. NASA has chosen Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to be the first ever mobile network to be built on the Moon. The space administration has granted Nokia $14.1 million to set up a working network and develop a human presence on the moon by 2028.
Building a system to allow for astronauts to make voice and video calls falls under the Artemis program, and it'll be at 4G speeds. Bell Labs, Nokia's U.S. industrial research branch, has offered up equipment to help design the network to be able to withstand the intense environments of rocket launches, lunar landings, and the vacuum of space. The aim is to launch the network and have it set up on the moon by 2022. The Artemis program also plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2024. If the program is successful, they will be the first humans on the moon in 50 years.
While NASA is working with Nokia on setting up the communications, the U.S. space agency chose SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics to develop the lunar landers for the astronauts to land on the moon in. The combination of a 4G network on the moon with more astronauts making the trip to Earths natural satellite provides us an easy way to easily send important data and better deploy payloads. When all network setup is successful, there are later plans to upgrade to 5G as well.
With Nokia competing with China's Huawei and Sweden's Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) for 5G contracts, a lunar deal is a huge win for the Finnish company. Many cellphone carriers are working to convince their consumers to switch to 5G, which boasts faster download speeds and lower latency, better known as lag. With 5G deals up for grabs, competition is fierce. Nokia not only promises 4G communications from the moon, it may also be the first 5G network off Earth. Nothing will give Nokia an edge over the competition like being able to be the first network to send telemetry and biometric data to and from orbit.