Humanity is returning to the Moon and we’re doing it in an exciting fashion. Technological advances have made lunar missions more feasible and cost-effective, opening up for a growing number of ambitious lunar missions. But how do we keep the spacecraft safely connected to Earth?
“The world is focused on the Moon once again, but instead of it being solely a political race by superpowers, there are now unique opportunities for scientific research, commercial activities and as a steppingstone for missions further out in the universe. For example, the Moon holds valuable resources such as water ice, helium-3, and rare earth minerals, which are essential for societal development on Earth and future space exploration,” says Greg Johnson, Business Development Director and “Lunar Guy” of SSC.
But the new aspirations come with plenty of challenges. Three companies that know all about that are Firefly Aerospace, ispace-U.S. and Astrolab.
Writing new lunar history
On 2 March 2025, Firefly Aerospace made history as the first commercial company to successfully land on the Moon. With their Blue Ghost Mission 1 (BGM1) lunar lander, the mission carried out 10 different science experiments and technology demonstrations.
“With this historic milestone, we aim to deliver reliable and affordable access to the Moon through annual lunar missions. This will pave the way for a lasting lunar presence that will help unlock access to the rest of the solar system for the world,” said Firefly CEO Jason Kim in a press release.
Throughout its 45-day transit to the Moon and 14 days of missions on its surface, Blue Ghost downlinked 119 GB of valuable data to the Earth, including some amazing imagery with SSC supporting communications throughout the mission. And shortly after landing, a world record was set with the establishment of a 10 Mbps real-time communication link between the lunar lander and Earth. Firefly reached the highest data rates ever to the surface of the Moon, via SSC’s ground stations and Blue Ghost’s robust communications system.
“With more powerful antennas that are capable of higher bandwidths, larger volumes of data can be downlinked to Earth in a shorter time. This ground capability is crucial during a lunar mission where the spacecraft’s lifetime is often limited to a single lunar day,” says Greg Johnson.
Staying connected to the far side of the Moon
Lunar communications is a unique category of space-to-Earth capabilities, but how do you stay connected to the far side of the Moon? For their upcoming Mission 3 (M3), U.S. lunar exploration company ispace-U.S. chose SSC to maintain a secure communications link for their APEX 1.0 lunar lander.
“The distance between Earth and the Moon warrants large ground station antennas to maintain reliable communication links with deep space vehicles throughout transit. This becomes even more challenging if intending to communicate with landed assets on the far side of the moon as they will never have a direct line of sight, or associated RF link, to Earth ground stations without an intermediary communications relay,” says Tyler Mundt, Executive Vice President of Engineering at ispace-U.S.
ispace’s Mission 3 aims to provide cis-lunar transportation and infrastructure services with the APEX1.0 lunar lander and Alpine & Lupine relay satellites to the Schrödinger Basin on the far side of the Moon. For the mission, scheduled to launch in 2027, ispace-U.S. will transport, land, and operate scientific payload instruments on the lunar surface for 14 Earth days, while operating relay satellites in lunar orbit and providing communication services for several months longer.
“For this kind of mission, we need resilient connectivity and flexible contact scheduling. With the help of SSC, we will deploy, operate, and station-keep two lunar-class relay satellite vehicles with S, X, and Ka-band capabilities for up to several years of service. It’s essential that these redundant communication paths provide the high reliability and low-latency data transmission our customers are looking for,” says Tyler Mundt.
Engineered for extremes
The Moon is indeed a harsh place that poses several challenges for earthly visits. For U.S. space company Astrolab’s lunar rover FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform), the preparations are intensifying. Set for a December launch onboard Astrobotic’s Griffin Mission-1, this will be Astrolab’s first lunar rover to operate on the Moon, aiming to demonstrate its onboard platform for follow-up missions with their larger FLEX (Flexible Logistics and Exploration) rover, on contract in the next couple years.
“Bringing FLIP to the Moon offers an opportunity to demonstrate and test many of the critical technologies that will advance the commercial FLEX vehicle, including full-sized batteries, tires, critical avionics systems, sensors, and software,” says Jaret Matthews, founder and CEO of Astrolab. He continues:
“All phases of this journey will be crucial, from launch to transit and landing, but for us the deployment of FLIP will be particularly important, of course. This will require a steady up- and downlink between the rover and Earth”.
The FLIP rover will explore the lunar surface with Direct to Earth (DTE) connectivity to the SSC Space US’s network of lunar class ground stations for a complete lunar day, and with a well selected hibernation point, additional lunar days as well.
The future is lunar
With more lunar landers, rovers, research experiments, mining equipment and other ambitious projects in need of connectivity, SSC keeps investing for the future. The company was recently selected as a service provider to NASA’s expanding Near Space Network (NSN) of commercial Direct-to-Earth capabilities and is also developing its own optical antenna network to support the growing lunar economy with higher data rates.
“It is fair to say that we have entered a new lunar era that will greatly impact the future of humanity. With SSC’s long heritage supporting lunar missions dating back to the 60’s, and the world’s most extensive commercial network of lunar antennas, we are paving the way,” ends Greg Johnson.
