Nokia Put a 4G Cellular Network on the Moon, but Couldn't Make a Phone Call

If everything went to program connected March 6, there'd beryllium a tiny 4G LTE web connected a tiny country of the satellite close now. The archetypal lunar 4G network—from Nokia—would person provided connectivity for respective rovers arsenic a portion of the IM-2 mission. The enactment was expected to pave the mode for NASA's Artemis III successful 2027, the archetypal crewed ngo to the satellite since 1972, wherever Nokia and Axiom Space volition integrate 4G LTE communications capabilities into astronaut spacesuits.

Unfortunately, Intuitive Machine's lander, Athena, landed connected her side—a destiny that befell the archetypal IM-1—not to notation 250 meters from its intended landing tract astatine the lunar southbound pole. The predisposition of the star panels, absorption of the sun, and acold temperatures successful the crater it landed successful each contributed to the information that Athena couldn't recharge. The institution announced connected March 7 that the ngo rapidly concluded. (IM-2 wasn't the lone trade to onshore connected the moon—earlier this week, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully touched down.)

While Nokia's 4G web couldn't beryllium deployed arsenic planned, the institution is inactive claiming it “delivered the archetypal cellular web to the moon" since it "validated cardinal aspects of the network's operation.” Inside Athena were respective instruments and rovers on with Nokia's Network successful a Box (NIB). In an interrogation astatine Mobile World Congress 2025, John Dow told WIRED this container is comprised of the radio, basal station, routing, and core, each integrated into a compact system. He's the wide manager of Nokia Bell Labs' Space Communications Systems.

Nokia says it successfully powered up the NIB, which received commands and transmitted information to Intuitive Machines' crushed presumption connected Earth. All strategy components were afloat functional, though it was lone online for astir 25 minutes until the powerfulness went out. The institution had planned to marque the archetypal cellular telephone connected the satellite with the rovers, but the vehicles weren't deployed.

What was expected to happen? A fewer hours aft landing, and aft strategy checks, Athena's store doorway would've opened and its onboard vehicles released. After traversing connected the lunar surface, the rovers would person extended their antennas and connected to the network. “Think of it similar a connected vehicle," Dow says. "It has idiosyncratic instrumentality that we built that volition link with a 4G nexus to the web successful a container connected Athena.”

One of these vehicles was the Micro Nova Hopper, nicknamed Grace, from Intuitive Machines—it was designed to hop into a permanently shadowed satellite crater to instrumentality pictures and readings, looking for imaginable signs of h2o ice.

Any information collected would person been transferred backmost to the NIB connected Athena, which would person transferred it to Earth via a long-haul outer uplink. (That travel to Earth takes astir a 2nd and a half.) Dow says the rovers were expected to question nether 2 kilometers distant from Athena (around 1.2 miles), which is however acold the broadband connectivity volition beryllium supported. If Lunar Outpost ngo controllers successful Colorado were to nonstop commands to the rovers, the information would person traveled via Intuitive Machine's direct-to-Earth information transmission work to Athena and dispersed done the 4G network.

While the 4G LTE spirit is the aforesaid arsenic connected Earth, Nokia's Lunar Surface Communications System was optimized for abstraction travel, with respective redundancies to retrieve from imaginable hardware oregon physics failures (lack of powerfulness was not 1 of them). Nokia's components were replaced with lighter materials erstwhile possible. For example, the institution says it replaced a dense cavity filter with a ceramic-based solution, reducing its value by 5 times. Nokia besides says it designed a thermal absorption solution that handles “excess vigor done conduction and radiation” since it can't usage atmosphere-dependent convection utilized successful electronics connected Earth.