Phone calls have officially taken the first step towards going interstellar. NASA has chosen Nokia
Building a system to allow for astronauts to make voice and video calls falls under the Artemis program, and it'll be at 4G speeds. Bell Labs, Nokia's U.S. industrial research branch, has offered up equipment to help design the network to be able to withstand the intense environments of rocket launches, lunar landings, and the vacuum of space. The aim is to launch the network and have it set up on the moon by 2022. The Artemis program also plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2024. If the program is successful, they will be the first humans on the moon in 50 years.
While NASA is working with Nokia on setting up the communications, the U.S. space agency chose SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics to develop the lunar landers for the astronauts to land on the moon in. The combination of a 4G network on the moon with more astronauts making the trip to Earths natural satellite provides us an easy way to easily send important data and better deploy payloads. When all network setup is successful, there are later plans to upgrade to 5G as well.
With Nokia competing with China's Huawei and Sweden's Ericsson