NASA Asks Students to Solve the Moon's Communications Problem

NASA's 2027 Human Lander Challenge is asking college and university students for ideas about what the agency calls one of the most critical needs for sustained lunar exploration: reliable communications. It's a useful corrective to the rockets-and-landers picture of lunar exploration, where the dramatic hardware gets the attention and the plumbing is assumed. A resilient communications system would have to connect astronauts, rovers, habitats, landers and mission support teams on Earth — many moving parts that only function together if they can talk to one another. In a place where nothing can be repaired quickly, that infrastructure is the kind whose absence would be felt everywhere at once.