Cislunar Comms & Nav: From “ComNet” to Commercial SLAs

Cislunar space comprises the region between Earth’s geosynchronous orbit and the Moon, including Earth-Moon Lagrange points.
Credit: Johns Hopkins APL

Coverage, timing, and laser links for a busy Earth–Moon corridor

A crowded Earth–Moon corridor needs its own internet and sat-nav: cross-links, relay coverage, precision timing, and navigation tailored to trajectories no Earth-bound constellation was built to serve. The architecture will mix RF relay, optical backhaul, and surface beacons. The business isn’t megabits for their own sake; it’s assured connectivity and timing that make other services—teleoperation, precision landing, depot transfers—reliable.

Startups can approach this like terrestrial network operators evolved cloud: service-level guarantees, observability, and APIs that expose coverage and latency ahead of time. Customers—landers, rovers, depots, stations—prefer to plan missions against published service maps rather than negotiate bespoke passes. Downstream, navigation products and time services become add-ons that reduce operational risk for autonomous systems.

The market voice is appropriately sober. Buyers seek proofs of continuity across eclipses and line-of-sight gaps, not just peak throughput claims. Distribution flows through mission integrators and primes who embed comms/nav selections early in design. Packaging trends toward subscriptions aligned with mission phases, with premium tiers for priority tasking or guaranteed windows during critical events. Adoption is helped by ground testbeds and lunar analogue sites where software and procedures rehearse against realistic conditions. When connectivity is as predictable as a launch window, the entire corridor becomes investable.