Back on Earth, the blackout will be a tense time for those with the job of maintaining contact with the spacecraft,<\/p>\n
At the Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall, in the south-west of England, a huge antenna has been collecting signals from the Orion capsule, carefully pinpointing its position throughout its journey, and feeding this information back to Nasa HQ.<\/p>\n
Matt Cosby, Goonhilly’s chief technology officer, told the BBC: “This is the first time we’re tracking a spacecraft with humans on it.<\/p>\n
“We’re going to get slightly nervous as it goes behind the Moon, and then we’ll be very excited when we see it again, because we know that they’re all safe.”<\/p>\n
But the hope is these dropouts in communications could soon become a thing of the past. And Cosby says that will be essential as Nasa \u2013 and other space agencies around the world \u2013 begin to build a Moon base and ramp up further exploration.<\/p>\n
“For a sustainable presence on the Moon, you need the full comms – you need the full 24 hours a day, even on the far side, because the far side will want to be explored as well,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back on Earth, the blackout will be a tense time for those with the job of maintaining contact…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":515060,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-515059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=515059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/515059\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/515060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=515059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=515059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=515059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}