Who Owns the Moon's Cell Towers?

What would happen if GPS suddenly stopped working everywhere?

All flights grounded. It is crazy for the truckersright now. Thousands of containers sit idle. The cost to trade is adding up fast.

Almost everything that moves something from point A to point B would come to a standstill. It would reveal just how important these 32 satellites circling Earth are. At least 1 trillion per year in business relies on them. So important that after realizing just how reliant they were on the American GPS system, Europe and China built their own versions over the last decade.

So what does it say if we're building it for the Moon? Because we are building it for the Moon. Fueled by nations racing to secure the best real estate on the Moon, NASA currently has plans underway to create the first-ever lunar GPS system, with the first satellite scheduled to be placed in orbit around the Moon this year.

If you wanted to explore the Moon, to land precisely where you want to, drive around on it in a rover, covering a specific route to get where you wanted to go, to say, "Here, at this spot, at these coordinates, there's water," you wouldn't be able to.

Which wouldn't be a problem if the number of payloads leaving Earth's atmosphere wasn't going parabolic and the amount of money being poured into what's being called the space economy wasn't going up at the same pace. But they are.

Two weeks ago, three completely separate missions all touched down on the Moon within a few days of each other. What these missions, the biggest ones clamoring to map, mine, and inhabit the Moon, have discovered is that the system used to guide things around the vastness of space is not capable of handling all the missions that want to use it by a huge margin.

The current system, it's somewhat comparable to a GPS system in space. It's called the Deep Space Network, but it's old and it's not built for what's going on in space today. This network, built back in 1960 with upgrades over time, is a mesh of 14 antennas located in one of three locations on Earth: Canberra, Australia; Barstow, California; Madrid, Spain.

Locations strategically chosen to allow at least one antenna to always be able to hear signals being shot at Earth from far-away spacecraft in any corner of our galaxy. These antennas, over 210 feet across, some of the biggest on Earth—this is 210 feet—are built for the specific purpose of picking up the faintest of signals from deep space.

Like the signals the Voyager probes send out. These things are like 16 billion miles away from Earth, and occasionally they've got to send information and data back to Earth, sending out a tiny little radio blip that takes 22 hours to cross space before reaching one of these antennas.

Naturally, these signals are extremely faint, like yelling down at somebody from on top of a mountain. So faint, in fact, that the Deep Space Network can only listen for one signal at a time. If you're a spacecraft that wants to talk to the network, you have to wait your turn.

Literally every data transfer is scheduled down to the minute. A Voyager probe will send, and knowing the data is coming in about 22 hours, the Deep Space Network stops listening for signals from any of the other 40 projects it communicates with at the time it expects the Voyager signal to finally reach Earth.

So in 2022, when Artemis, the new flagship U.S. program to begin exploring the Moon, kicked off and things went haywire during the mission, the limitations of the Deep Space Network were revealed in perfect detail. Aimed at the Moon, the Artemis I mission was scheduled to spend 25 and a half days in space: launch, make its way towards the Moon, deploy 10 satellites en route, loop around the Moon, come back home.

A long trip, about 1.4 million miles. Navigation had to be precise, and the spacecraft, Orion, had to stay connected to the Deep Space Network most of the time. Now, because an antenna on the Deep Space Network can only interact with one spacecraft at a time, how much capacity it has is measured in hours.

By the time Orion had launched, deployed those satellites on the way to the Moon, circled the Moon, and came back, the whole mission ate up 1,774 hours on the network, 23% of everything the network had to offer during that time.

And during that 25 days, while Artemis was out, the James Webb Telescope, the one that sends back all those beautiful pictures of deep space, had to wait multiple days before it could connect to the network. It usually connects once every 12 hours, but once every 70 or 80 hours became the norm while the Artemis mission was pogging up all of the network.

And the James Webb satellite cannot store a lot of data. It has half the storage of a base model iPhone, and you know how quickly that storage fills up, making it painfully clear that any type of sustained presence or exploration of the Moon was absolutely out of the question without a network dedicated solely for the Moon.

If the U.S. is going to compete for the Moon again, and in modern fashion, against a new player, the Chinese space agency, that has already landed a probe on the dark side of the Moon, a new system has to be built.

Let's pause on that word "compete" for a moment, because it's essential to understanding why what sounds ridiculous—GPS for the Moon, really an entire communications network for the Moon—is more of an inevitability than the latest space craze. Because there have always been voices out there talking about mining the Moon or asteroids, setting up a colony on Mars, and of course it just hasn't happened.

But today, the 2020s, things really are different in two key ways. One, reusable rockets are making trips into space cheap, and that has caused number two, FOMO, the fear of missing out on first-come, first-served space territory, has been rekindled with the rise of China and their explicit statement of becoming the dominant space power.

History here on Earth is overflowing with conflicts and power struggles over land and water. South China Sea, Mesopotamia, Vietnam, Sudan, South Africa, American Indians, Ukraine. The list is almost infinitely long if you want to go back millennia. Almost every culture on Earth has been a bad, aggressive actor at one point or another.

So what we found is that it's much easier to just be first, play in a flag, and set up permanently. There you go. This is what will inevitably fan the flames of this second space race. The U.S., China, Europe, Japan, Russia are not even contemplating the idea of not trying to stay clean to space.

It's too infinite. There's too much possibility. So every move the others make will prod everyone else to do better or at least try to catch up. The outer space treaty and Artemis accords will matter very little, just like the international law of the sea, which only kind of matters.

The Moon is ground zero, particularly the South Pole of the Moon. And the Deep Space Network can't see the dark side of the Moon at all, which is half of the Moon and can barely see the South Pole of the Moon, where all the interest and mission plans are piling up.

This is where the Artemis mission wants to land. As I've talked about in a previous video, this is where we know what are to be on the Moon, making it the place to be if you want to sustain human presence on the Moon.

So you need a satellite to be able to communicate with things in that area. And to do that, the satellite must have a clear view of that area. Same thing with the dark side of the Moon, the side that will never be in view of Earth because the Moon rotates at the same speed as Earth.

You need a constellation of satellites that look down on the whole Moon, receive data, and then bounce that data to another satellite before the final satellite relays the data back to a ground station on Earth. This is exactly what the company Intuitive Machines is building: the first private company to ever land an object on the Moon, and the first American anything to land something on the Moon since 1977's Apollo 17 landing.

In fact, check this out. You can see their last landing. This fuzzy spot is their IM-1 lander on the surface of the Moon. Launched on a SpaceX rocket, it traveled seven days once it left Earth's atmosphere, landed, and then it tipped over.

But despite the tip, much of its instrumentation was still functioning, so the mission was considered quite the success. And in demonstrating that success, NASA chose them to build GPS for the Moon, a five-satellite system that will have capacity to stream 4K video back to Earth and to get navigation down to GPS-level accuracy.

In all, the contract to build what is being called the Cislunar Network is worth nearly $5 billion. That lands at the intersection of two of the main sections of the space economy: SATCOM and geospatial intelligence. We'll talk about the others in coming videos because to bring it up for a third time, this chart that represents the number of payloads being launched into space is going to keep going up.

If for just one reason, one of the most powerful reasons humans do anything, FOMO, and the amount of money allocated to the space economy will go with it. The subscribe button is the gateway to those videos and a great way to support the channel.

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