The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced support for a moonlight project where a consortium of private companies and firms will place a satellite star to create permanent communication links around the moon. The current roadmap for the return of humans to the moon is in the Artemis program, an international collaboration led by NASA that will see people return to the lunar surface by the end of the decade.
ESA will provide the necessary components for these missions, including a new space station around the moon, the Lunar Gateway, as well as a communication module with a communication relay like the Lunar Pathfinder. The two companies, led by Sari Satellite Technology Limited and Telespazio, will implement a plan to create this communication link between our planet and the moon.
ESA hopes that it will have the opportunity for cheap missions to our natural satellites in the near future. Elodie Viau, Director of Telecommunications and Integrated Applications, said in a statement, “A permanent link to the moon enables sustainable space search for all our international partners, including commercial space companies. Using ESA-backed telecommunications and navigation services for the moon, explorers will be able to easily navigate all the knowledge gained from these lunar missions and relay to Earth.”
“A strong, reliable and efficient telecommunications and navigation system will make the dozens of individual missions planned for the moon more affordable and enable smaller countries to become space nations, inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers.”
But not everyone is interested in these plans to build a 4G / LTE network on the moon, or similar ones from NASA. Such a view could be interrupted by an exciting prospect of returning to the moon, a huge radio telescope was built inside a hole in it. The project, known as the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT), was recently awarded $500,000 by NASA. LCRT will be very far from the moon and due to this unique location and lack of interference it will be able to study the cosmic dark ages, there was a period in the universe when no star was born.
