How Do You Make LTE Relevant at MWC 2023? Fly It to the Moon

BARCELONA—Next to all of the demonstrations of 5G possibilities around the MWC show floor here, an exhibit that spotlights plain old 4G LTE might seem an irrelevant afterthought. Especially if no human being will be able to use the LTE hardware in question.

But the LTE project Nokia is showing off in a corner of its exhibit space targets a use case that was never on the map during LTE’s buildout in the previous decade: the south pole of the Moon. 

NASA awarded Nokia a $14.1 million contract in 2020 to build the first lunar LTE network as part of a Tipping Point series of awards intended to advance technologies that could be of use in future NASA missions such as its Artemis moon shots. The gear from Nokia Bell Labs, built for an undisclosed cost, will hitch a ride to Earth’s satellite later this year as a payload on the space startup Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission(Opens in a new window), to be launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. 

A 1:1 model of Intuitive Machines’ lunar rover sits on a shelf at Nokia’s MWC exhibit in front of a rendering of Intuitive’s Nova-C lander.
(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

That Houston company’s Nova-C lander will include a Nokia LTE base station that it will use to communicate with a roughly suitcase-sized, four-wheeled rover—a full-scale model of which sits in a corner of Nokia’s setup here. 

“For the most part, we are leveraging out standard 3GPP technology,” principal investigator Luis Maestro told a group of journalists. The lander and rover will communicate on an 1,800MHz band using hardware based on Nokia’s Earthbound gear(Opens in a new window) but hardened for its unforgiving context—work that Maestro suggested could inform wireless deployments in some of Earth’s less accessible places.

In addition to extremes of heat and cold, this experimental setup will also face coverage constraints not found on Earth. Part of that is the Nova-C lander only standing about 13 feet tall; the other part is the Moon being so much smaller than the Earth. As Maestro put it: “You get to the horizon faster.”

Maestro and his fellow researchers expect the mission to run two weeks, with the rover first only rolling 1,000 yards or so away and then driving further to test those range limits. Then the lunar night will kick in, leaving the solar-powered lander and rover offline. 

Researchers will attempt to reestablish contact once daylight returns, but Maestro didn’t sound too optimistic about the odds of that. Which may be warranted, considering that the first generation of LTE hardware on Earth also had disappointing battery life.

Nokia says this setup will provide for more bandwidth than NASA’s usual point-to-point radio links—the company earlier told me it’s aiming for 50Mbps downloads(Opens in a new window). But why not still faster 5G? Maestro notes that LTE remains “the most widely used mobile technology,” but this project has also been in the works for years. Nokia first (Opens in a new window)signed a deal in 2018(Opens in a new window) to test lunar LTE on a privately funded European mission that has since been canceled.

Now, Nokia professes itself ready for this extraterrestrial test. The only remaining issue is a launch date. “We’ve gone through several design cycles, full test cycles,” Thierry Klein, president of Bell Labs Solutions Research at Nokia Bell Labs, told reporters via phone. “We are essentially done.”