With the Artemis program, successor to the famous Apollo program, the United States intends to relaunch lunar exploration in a sustainable way.
It was President Donald Trump who wanted to relaunch lunar exploration. If several administrations had thought about it before him, but he really gave the decisive impetus. Human beings will therefore, if all goes well, set foot on the ground of the Moon again, for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. The first Artemis mission took off on November 16, but it was a 25-day flight unmanned.
REPLAY. Mission Artemis: why is the Moon again the center of interest? The Franceinfo Talk debate
Artemis 2 is scheduled to take place in 2024, with a crew, but without a planned Moon landing. For that, it will be necessary to wait, until 2025 and Artemis 3, with normally on board, the first woman who will walk on the terrestrial satellite. For the moment, NASA plans eight Artemis missions and the installation of a base on site, capable of accommodating four astronauts.
The Artemis 3 mission should last six days, those after even longer. The Internet therefore becomes essential. You have to be able to communicate, to have a kind of GPS also to explore the Moon. LunaNet, the network that NASA intends to develop, will be equivalent to the terrestrial Internet and should give astronauts more freedom of movement than the systems of the 1970s.
A cell tower on the Moon
The agency intends to install the equivalent of a relay antenna on the surface with the participation of private companies such as the start-up Aquarian Space or Nokia to ensure, at least initially, a flow of 100 megabits per second. There will undoubtedly be a need for more as human activity increases. The Internet would also make it possible to monitor the health of astronauts from Earth, to analyze the weather, in quotes, local.
In the mind of the American government, the Internet is not limited to what the astronauts will do with it. There is a geopolitical and economic dimension to asserting its Internet network rather than that of Russia and especially China. The Artemis program plans to set up its base at the south pole of the Moon, where there are traces of water ice, where the sun never shines. Installing the necessary equipment will take time. A rocket does not yet take off for the Moon with the regularity of a TGV linking Paris to Marseille.