An early-stage space internet project recently received $650,000 in seed funding to work on the development and technical reviews in order to connect the Earth, moon, and possibly Mars to broadband.
Aquarian Space announced the funding from Draper Associates on Thursday (March 17) as a step toward its long-term goal of bringing high-speed internet to the Earth, the moon, and Mars in the coming years, with speeds capable of streaming 4K video. By 2024, the company plans to launch its first lunar communications system.
Aquarian said in a statement that its goal is to build what it calls Solnet, which will be based on "commercial high data rate, high-speed delivery satellite networks" with speeds of 100 megabits per second.
"In 2021 there were 13 landers, orbiters and rovers on and around the moon," Kelly Larson, CEO of Aquarian Space, said in the statement. "By 2030, we will have around 200, creating a multibillion-dollar lunar economy. But this can't happen without solid, reliable Earth-to-moon communications."
Aquarian Space is conducting technical reviews with several companies involved in NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, as well as other companies in the United States and around the world interested in moon missions, according to the company.
CLPS will launch several payloads, landers, and other scientific instruments to the moon later in the 2020s to support NASA's Artemis program, which aims to land humans on the moon by the end of the decade.
The Artemis program, led by NASA, is a new chapter in lunar exploration that aims to send humans farther into space than ever before.
The program is a NASA-led international collaboration that includes contributions from the European Space Agency (ESA), the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, as well as participation from several companies. The program also lays the groundwork for future deep-space missions to far-flung destinations such as Mars.
Aquarian's goal is to provide "end-to-end data and communication services by 2024" to the companies with which it interacts, though no details were provided other than the fact that customers will not need to change their design to accommodate Aquarian's technology.
Aquarian intends to launch a space-based relay data service called Solnet in the future but has provided few technical details so far, such as the types of satellites it intends to use or how it intends to transport these satellites to space.
Aquarian believes that, in addition to high-speed Internet, it plans to include space situation awareness for aspects such as looking at space debris, tracking space weather, and providing scientific information from the moon and Mars.
