Arthur is coming out of retirement. The 26-metre satellite dish that famously brought Britain its first crackly, black-and-white satellite TV pictures from the US in 1962 could one day find a new role as part of a control hub for a lunar GPS.

That’s the ultimate goal of a new initiative announced at the Farnborough International Airshow in the UK this week. Goonhilly Earth Station (GES), which runs 30 satellite dishes strewn across the clifftops of Cornwall’s Lizard peninsula, and Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), a satellite maker based in Guildford, UK, have hatched a plan to send a blizzard of remote-sensing CubeSats to orbit the moon by 2020.

Tiny and cheap, CubeSats have democratised space science by making it affordable – even to student teams. But until now, they have been limited to missions in Earth orbit. That’s because their diminutive size means they can only have small antennas with which to receive control signals and send data.

But enormous, high power TV uplink dishes like Arthur could communicate with CubeSats at far greater distances from Earth – such as in lunar orbit. NASA’s earth-girding array of massive dishes, the Deep Space Network, offers similar communication range to spacecraft like Mars probes.


To that end, GES and SSTL want to launch an orbiter called Lunar Pathfinder on an Indian rocket. The craft will deliver 7 CubeSats weighing around 12 kilograms each into lunar orbit. They plan to charge customers £1 million per kilogram.

SSTL and GES are seeking customers for their idea and will make the final decision in February. But they already have four companies willing to fly lunar CubeSats with them, says Matthew Cosby, chief scientist at GES. “Prospecting for lunar mining is one promising application,” he says.

Close shave

The partners hope to launch a CubeSat-laden Lunar Pathfinder every two years. When there are enough of them in orbit, the orbiters could work together to provide a GPS-like navigation system for future lunar colonists, says GES CEO Ian Jones.

If these ambitious plans come to pass, it will have been a close shave for Goonhilly. The site was supposed to have been closed down by BT (British Telecommunications), its former owner, and turned into a wind farm.

But Jones – a former BT research engineer – saw the site’s potential. So he and colleagues raised venture capital to buy the site from BT in 2014.

“We’ve now renovated the dishes and got all the antennas back up and running again,” he says. “It wasn’t easy – some had trees growing through them.”