Nokia Put a 4G Cellular Network on the Moon but Couldn’t Make a Phone Call

If everything went to plan on March 6, there'd be a small 4G LTE network on a tiny area of the moon right now. The first lunar 4G network—from Nokia—would have provided connectivity for several rovers as a part of the IM-2 mission. The work was supposed to pave the way for NASA's Artemis III in 2027, the first crewed mission to the moon since 1972, where Nokia and Axiom Space will integrate 4G LTE communications capabilities into astronaut spacesuits.

Unfortunately, Intuitive Machine's lander, Athena, landed on her side—a fate that befell the original IM-1—not to mention 250 meters from its intended landing site at the lunar south pole. The orientation of the solar panels, direction of the sun, and cold temperatures in the crater it landed in all contributed to the fact that Athena couldn't recharge. The company announced on March 7 that the mission quickly concluded. (IM-2 wasn't the only craft to recently land on the moon—earlier this week, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully touched down.)

While Nokia's 4G network couldn't be deployed as planned, the company is still claiming it “delivered the first cellular network to the moon" since it "validated key aspects of the network's operation.” Inside Athena were several instruments and rovers along with Nokia's Network in a Box (NIB). In an interview at Mobile World Congress 2025, John Dow told WIRED this box is comprised of the radio, base station, routing, and core, all integrated into a compact system. He's the general manager of Nokia Bell Labs' Space Communications Systems.

Nokia says it successfully powered up the NIB, which received commands and transmitted data to Intuitive Machines' ground station on Earth. All system components were fully functional, though it was online for only about 25 minutes until the power went out. The company

had planned to make the first cellular call on the moon with the rovers, but the vehicles weren't deployed.

What was supposed to happen? A few hours after landing, and after system checks, Athena's garage door would've opened and its onboard vehicles released. After traversing on the lunar surface, the rovers would have extended their antennas and connected to the network. “Think of it like a connected vehicle," Dow says. "It has user equipment that we built that will connect with a 4G link to the network in a box on Athena.”

One of these vehicles was the Micro Nova Hopper, nicknamed Grace, from Intuitive Machines—it was designed to hop into a permanently shadowed moon crater to take pictures and readings, looking for potential signs of water ice.

Any data collected would have been transferred back to the NIB on Athena, which would have transferred it to Earth via a long-haul satellite uplink. (That trip to Earth takes about a second and a half.) Dow says the rovers were supposed to travel under 2 kilometers away from Athena (around 1.2 miles), which is how far the broadband connectivity will be supported. If Lunar Outpost mission controllers in Colorado were to send commands to the rovers, the data would have traveled via Intuitive Machine's direct-to-Earth data transmission service to Athena and dispersed through the 4G network.

While the 4G LTE flavor is the same as on Earth, Nokia's Lunar Surface Communications System was optimized for space travel, with several redundancies to recover from potential hardware or electronic failures (lack of power was not one of them). Nokia's components were replaced with lighter materials when possible. For example, the company says it replaced a heavy cavity filter with a ceramic-based solution, reducing its weight by five times. Nokia also says it designed a thermal management solution that handles “excess heat through conduction and radiation” since it can't use atmosphere-dependent convection used in electronics on Earth.