The moon is to get its first 4G mobile network next year — exactly half a century after Nasa astronaut Neil Armstrong first made his “giant leap for mankind”. Vodafone Germany and Nokia are teaming up to create the network, which will support the operations of rovers collecting scientific data and reporting back from the astral body’s surface. Vodafone said it had appointed Nokia as its technology partner to develop a space-grade network which will be a small piece of hardware weighing less than a bag of sugar.In what will be the first-ever commercial lunar landing, Berlin-based space exploration company PTScientists will launch ultra-light mobile masts from Nokia Bell Labs using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, taking off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, USA. Vodafone engineers will then build the energy-efficient network using Nokia’s hardware to enable Audi-made lunar quattro rovers to transmit data and highdefinition (HD) footage back to its base station on earth for monitoring. Vodafone hopes the network will be able to broadcast on the 1800 MHz frequency band to deliver the universe’s first HD livestream direct from the moon.“This is a crucial first step for sustainable exploration of the solar system. In order for humanity to leave the cradle of earth, we need to develop infrastructures beyond our home planet,” said Robert Bohme, CEO and founder of PTScientists.“With Mission to the Moon, we will establish and test the first elements of a dedicated communications network on the moon. The great thing about this longterm evolution solution is that it saves so much power, and the less energy we use sending data, the more we have to do science,” he said.“This project involves a radically innovative approach to the development of the mobile network infrastructure,” Vodafone Germany’s CEO Hannes Ametsreiter said. AGENCIES