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NASA Plans Lunar Mobile Phone Network
If NASA and the British National Space Centre succeed in their 'MoonLite mission' you won't be able to say, "In space no one can hear your ringtone." They plan on building a satellite system/phone network that would provide full four-bar signal coverage for colonists living in the base NASA wants to build at the south pole of the moon after 2020.
A couple of hundred thousand miles away is a lot of roaming.
$20+ a meg and $5 a text and $100 for 60 min of talk time
Great. The Moon will have better coverage than my current Sprint plan. I bet their data plan will be cheaper too.
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
noone can hear you now!
Monstar L
There's only going to be four bars to provide coverage on the moon?
It had better be a small colony, then. Or they'd better be really big bars, hopefully without annoyingly trendy kitsch, and hopefully with some really good whiskey.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
I wonder how long it takes your brain to adapt to talking to somebody when there's a 1-second+ delay each way? I've had conversations via satellite that seemed to have about a 1/2 second round-trip delay, and it was annoying as hell for the first few minutes.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
He'll delay Constellation for five years (pdf link, go to the last page), which will result in layoffs for all the people we'd need to get to the moon, and then we'll have to go try to re-hire them. Meanwhile the designs are being done now, so the plans will just sit for 5 years going out of date. Brilliant. And what will the money be used for? Saving no child left behind. Yes, let's dump more money in to education, that will fix it.
Yes. Optimally using light to go between earth and moon satellites it would be about 2 seconds. In reality it will vary significantly with the orbit of the moon, and of course nothing is optimal.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
"would there be an audible lag time for calls like this?"
Nope, the article says any lag time would fall either below 20 or above 20,000 Hz. If you were trying to talk to fido, he might notice a delay, however.
This is great, I'll be able to place a call on the moon but I still can't place one in my house.
Exactly what I was thinking. This is precisely why NASA is going down the drain. They can't even get full cellphone signal, let alone get their units right.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now the Moon will another place I can't hide from the ex.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
As soon as there's any hint of a mobile phone mast getting installed all the NIMBY's start moaning, writing to their MP's, holding protests and petitioning the phone company.
If there is life on other planets, all we have to do to find it is to announce that someone will errect a mobile mast - then just wait for the protests from the aliens. No protests means we are truly alone, afterall.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It's a base station!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Please mod up that AC above!
DANGER! Do Not Touch! 100,000,000 Ohms!
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
NO, ITS SHIT!
Sorry, had to be done.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I have the Ted Kennedy phone coverage plan... they claim "more bars everywhere".
4 bars on the moon?! somehow, I know I'm getting screwed when I would get better service on the moon than I would at my house.
I sincerely hope that the "mobile phone network" concept is the result of bad journalism rather than bad thinking. There are historical reasons for the development of telcom concepts in their current form; but the idea of transplanting them to an area not bound by legacy infrastructure is just pathetic. Are we still going to be separating "voice" and "data" in space? Will "SMS" still be a special kind of data thousands of times more expensive than the normal stuff? What times qualify as "nights and weekends" on Mercury?(I'm guessing that free nights and weekends will not be offered on the dark side of the moon) So much of our existing mobile phone infrastructure is just a mass of stupid legacy crap, good-for-business-bad-for-everybody pricing structures, and arbitrary limitations. Worse, much of it is hacked on top of a much more sensible wireless packet switched infrastructure.
Wireless data links are good, obviously, particularly in places that have no wires. The incarnation we are stuck with on earth, though, is nothing short of pathetic. Surely we can do better than that in a place without legacy issues?
I don't mean to troll, I really don't, but this just seems to be an incredibly stupid waste of resources.
I don't see it working that well due to the lag, and the costs are incredible.
Are we really trying to put bandwidth (that is what is essentially being done) on the Moon?
Isn't the whole reason why we are having problems with bandwidth/transfer caps in the US due to a lack of bandwidth? Maybe we should be investing in our infrastructures at home and solving the problems we have here with our current bandwidth before trying to place some incredibly expensive bandwidth on the moon for possible colonists.
Now I understand this might be done for national pride, just like the space race in the 60's. Are we really going to have that much pride that we were the first to offer cellphone service on the Moon?
First, NASA tricks AT&T in setting up a cell phone network on the moon, then, in order to recoup their investment, AT&T must somehow get the moon colonized.
"Guess where *I'm* calling from!"
...you won't be able to say, "In space no one can hear your ringtone." Well that's a damn shame, considering how everyone uses that phrase all the time./* No Comment */
I find it amusing that just this morning I read that the Air Force is in an uproar about needing $100B dollars over the next five years, just to prevent it's fleet from becoming anything less than cutting-edge.
Yet, NASA receives a mere $16.2B per year - and even with planned increases will not exceed the amount the Air Force is asking for in addition to what it already gets.
In short; I find it ridiculous that you can call anything "obsolete" that is barely funded, but has a much more sophisticated task to do. When NASA is as well funded as the Air Force, and can still not perform to par, then you can complain about it being obsolete.
[Ego]out
An excellent question.
One only has to refer to the impact of the right-wing noise machine to see the answer. After all, it was the conservatives that created this monster, and they control the loudest of the media outlets. If one were to kill off "no child left behind", the right-wing media would jump all over it and label the people behind its killing as being "anti-child", "anti-education", "anti-progress", "anti-jesus", and of course "anti-america" and hence "anti-patriotic".
Hell, just look at what those same media outlets did to Howard Dean's campaign in 2004, or what they've done to Kucinich every time he's tried to run.
So in short, you would never be successfully hailed for saving children (due to the true controls over the US media), though you can certainly try. The neocons have set up almost a perfect storm by establishing this woefully underfunded beast of a bill.
Add to that the spineless fowl in congress that aren't willing to call out Bushco on their offenses, and you see that we're stuck with it for a long time to come.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I wonder if there is a block of IP addresses reserved for extraterrestrial use.