Infrastructure Stack · Layer 01
Communications & PNT
The links and signals everything else depends on.
The Vencore lens · our primary area of focus
Why it matters
The links and signals everything else depends on.
Landers need to talk to Earth and to each other. Rovers need to know where they are. Operators need a shared sense of time. On the Moon there is no GPS, no fiber and, on the far side and in polar craters, no direct line of sight to Earth.
Communications and positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) are the layer that turns a collection of individual missions into a network. It is the layer Vencore watches most closely, because every other layer in the stack inherits its limits.
The links and signals that allow landers to communicate, rovers to navigate, operators to coordinate and multiple commercial activities to function as a network.
Inside this layer
6 building blocks
Ground stations
Earth-side antennas and deep-space network capacity. Every lunar mission competes for the same limited dish time, which makes commercial ground capacity a real bottleneck.
Relays
Orbital and surface relays that extend coverage to the far side, the poles and permanently shadowed regions where the signal cannot reach Earth directly.
Spectrum
Allocation, coordination and protection of frequencies as lunar traffic multiplies. Interference on the Moon is a governance problem as much as an engineering one.
Timing
A shared lunar time reference. Networks, navigation and autonomous systems all depend on clocks that agree, and lunar clocks run measurably differently from Earth clocks.
Navigation
Position and velocity for precision landing, surface traverse and rendezvous. A lunar equivalent of GNSS does not yet exist at scale.
Interoperability
Common standards so hardware from many providers and nations can share the same networks instead of each mission bringing its own.
Connect the stack
Dependencies
Rather than evaluating companies in isolation, we look for dependencies between infrastructure layers, and ask what must exist before the next layer can scale.
This layer depends on
This layer enables
Across every layer
Questions we are watching
Open questions
- Who owns the relay layer, and on what terms do commercial missions get access?
- Which timing and navigation standards win, and who sets them?
- How much ground-station capacity exists for the number of missions being planned?