Nice, soon the moon will have better mobile connectivity than some rural areas in Germany.
Oh thank god. Was getting sick of only having hella overpriced and slow satellite internet there.
We believe delivering Nokia’s 4G/LTE system to the lunar surface is a transformative moment in the commercialization of space and the maturity of the lunar economy.
… I fucking hate capitalism.
SPACE SUCKS, FU SPACE PEOPLE
Nokia still exists?
Yeah, Eriksson too. Both pretty much abandoned their consumer phone business. They have pivoted to afaik mostly telecommunications infrastructure. But both companies do a bunch of other stuff.
Nokia and Eriksson were really happy when Huawei started being kicked out of 5G infrastructure.
That’s not a bad bet. Clearly telecommunications infrastructure is not going away and even radio towers are never going away until physics finds an alternative.
I do kinda miss Nokia’s creativity tho
HMD are the the spun off Nokia mobile division. They just released a pretty fresh new android flagship.
Wow HMD’s stuff looks pretty slick!
yes
Meshtastic on the moon… Moontastic!
We believe delivering Nokia’s 4G/LTE system to the lunar surface is a transformative moment in the commercialization of space
Absolutely love the lack of regulation for space. Going to love seeing the Google tm Moon in 50 years.
Yeah these companies think just because they can they should.
Fuck 'em. The moon is part of the view from my garden.
I’ll fight for that.
Well, no regulation means we can be space pirates and fuuuuck Google up.
They’ll be laws against that though.
Obviously, otherwise we’d be privateers, which is not even cool.
I’d do that… give me a letter of mark, a capsule and some inertial impactors, I’m ready to go.
I dunno. What kind of service can you get with LowG™?
I know it kind of sounds silly, but this is some of the very first infrastructure on The Moon, and that’s pretty cool.
The Moon will likely be our main port for travel within our solar system - if we made a lunar space elevator we would use it as our launch point without having to expend so much fuel launching from Earth like we do with traditional rockets.
The moon rotates too slowly (about once every 30 days), you don’t want a space elevator for the moon, the tether would have to be ridiculously long.
But there’s no atmosphere, so you have another good option: a linear accelerator, or mass driver. Basically you make a very long, very straight rail and use electromagnetism to accelerate a craft right up to orbital velocity. The only complicated part is constructing 50 km of rail, but I mean, it’s more time consuming than complicated. This is actually way more feasible than a space elevator.
You still need to fire an engine on the far side of your orbit though which makes it more difficult as it still needs to be able to propel itself (while surviving the acceleration)
Well surviving the acceleration is trivial. I figured a 50km track in the post up above, in 50km you can accelerate up to lunar orbit velocities at just 1g of constant acceleration. So if your probe can survive sitting still on earth, it can survive accelerating at that speed.
You’re right though, you do need a small amount of thrust when you reach the top of your arc, but really not much. 50 m/s of DeltaV would do just fine. In other words, opening a can of compressed air would basically do it.
Or alternatively, you could use a mechanical system; you could have the vehicle (basically a rail cart) separate from the cargo with a powerful spring, pushing the cargo up, and the cart down. That mechanical system is also more effective the higher the apogee is, so if you launched the vehicle into a higher, more elliptical lunar orbit, that small push at the top pulls your low end of the orbit up much higher.
Ah, I was thinking more of a spinlaunch thing. Yours would make more sense, but would require a fuckton of industry in space or on the moon to have it work. I wonder how much more effective a self contained spinlaunch style thing would be on the moon.
Yeah, the application kind of assumes a lot of industry though. I mean if there isn’t a lot of industry, what are you shipping off the moon? But still, 50 km of rail is a lot, but it’s far less than the 325,000 km of tether that a space elevator would need…
Spin launch would definitely be feasible for some cargo, theoretically it would be a bit easier in vacuum, though that would probably also present other challenges. However, with a reasonably sized spin launch system (like the size of a 4 story apartment building), the payload needs to handle forces around 3000 Gs (which is a lot even for cargo). Unfortunately, you’d need to go larger for lower G force. So this also requires a lot of industry.
Wut? Impracticality aside, could they build such a “ridiculously long tether”? What’s they make it of? Musk farts? Can’t wait for him to bankrupt the u.s. and build a space elevator that breaks and shatters, ruining astronomy and prospects of drone explorations of Mars
Uh, well truth be told, you could probably use steel cable or carbon fiber for a lunar space elevator cable, but you would need some really insane quantities… Like I said, I wouldn’t recommend it, just go the mass driver route instead.
But why are you even bringing up Musk? Nobody is suggesting involving him…
A station and then a mine would imo make more sense for a first.
People really not feeling this in the current climate for sure
…but you have to get whatever it is you’re transporting to the moon first
As the saying goes, “orbit is halfway to anywhere.”
Getting into and out of gravity wells takes far more fuel than moving between planetary bodies. A space elevator that can take cargo from lunar orbit to the surface and back removes one difficulty, while being slightly less sci-fi-ish than a terrestrial elevator.
They addressed that in their post already.
No faith for 5G?
Nah there’s always less G on the moon.
