The Intuitive Machines Athena Lander Mission
The Intuitive Machines Athena lander mission to the moon has officially been declared “dead” after landing on its side in a crater where it is unable to generate sufficient power for the planned mission. However, in the short time that the lander systems remained operational, the first broadband cellular network—the so-called Network in a Box (NIB)—was successfully booted up and operated without issue during the allotted time. This represents a critical first step toward creating the foundation to allow machines and humans to communicate and collaborate to build a future multi-planetary existence for humanity.
Thierry Klein, president of Bell Labs Solutions Research, which developed the critical networking technologies from their terrestrial cousins, said, “This has been a crazy dream that has taken almost a decade to become reality.”
AI and Space Exploration
In order to establish the right conditions for microbial, plant or human life on any other celestial body, an enormous amount of pre-work needs to be undertaken by intelligent machines that would be responsible for a multitude of tasks such as exploration (to find the optimal sites), mining (to excavate the elemental and energy sources), construction (of processing plants, farms, habitation and the connecting infrastructure) and control (of the resultant environment and the associated systems).
In short, AI is a foundational technology for the future of humanity beyond Earth. The first step on this historic journey happened yesterday. The Artemis II mission was created with the goal of analyzing the lunar surface and the “dark side” of a crater to look for water in these areas that are permanently shaded from the sun.
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer
NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer , which enjoyed an Uber-like rideshare on the same launch, has been deployed to lunar orbit where it will help map the distribution of the different forms of water on the moon. Despite the setback experienced by the Athena mission during landing, the importance of the successful establishment of the first network based on terrestrial cellular technologies should not be overlooked.
The Role of Bell Labs
The communications technologies deployed as the cornerstone of the Athena mission were developed by Bell Labs , the renowned American hub of innovation, that over the last 100 years invented many of the foundational technologies and theorems that underpin current communications and computing systems, as well as digital audio and visual capture and compression systems.
The first space-specific technology was created by Bell Labs with the launch of the first communication satellite, Telstar-1 in 1962, to provide voice, data and TV broadcast transmission across the Atlantic. Bell Labs’ technologies and expertise then played a pivotal role underpinning the NASA Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions.
Future of Space Communications
There are also fundamental technological questions that need to be answered, for example, regarding the propagation of radio-frequency waves on the lunar surface, and whether non-line-of-sight communication that will be required for communication into and out of deep craters operates the same way as on Earth.
The immediate next steps will be to take the learnings from the current mission and apply them to the Artemis III mission , which will be the first time humans have returned to the moon in more than 50 years. This mission will further the exploration of lunar water supplies, with a weeklong stay by astronauts wearing next-generation spacesuits equipped with these communications modules, allowing voice, telemetry, biometric data, high resolution images and streaming video from the astronaut suits back to Mission Control.
Looking further ahead, Klein said, “Rather than each mission bringing its own network, a permanently installed communication infrastructure will be installed on the moon and any mission devices, machines or humans will become temporary subscribers on that network.”
And beyond the moon is Mars, for which the communication needs are even more challenging because there is a 20-minute delay between Earth and Mars, rendering real-time control from Earth impossible. “This will require the creation of a Martian cloud computing and communications platform,” says Klein. And, with these foundations, we will be well on the way to the imagined human-AI symbiotic future that is literally out of this world.
