Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)
The solar eclipse Monday was impressive, but did you ever want to see it from the moon?

Well, some day you may.
China, US, Europe, Japan, India, and a host of commercial companies, are part of a new lunar space race.
And this time around, they aren’t looking to plant a flag. They want to create a new lunar economy, one that isn’t reliant on lunar tourism.
This economy would be fueled by creative business plans including:

• Mining helium-3.
• Lunar data centers for secure data storage.
• Extracting and processing water from the lunar poles.
• Arrays of sensors and telescopes.

To fulfill this vision requires a lot of development. Fortunately, we have already been there, and the rockets, satellites, lunar landers, and comm links have already been demonstrated.
One critical missing element: a lunar position, navigation, and timing (PNT) system, grounded by a common lunar time standard (see below).
It may not seem important; after all, you won’t need directions in your moon buggy any time soon.
But that ignores the most critical function of PNT: time and synchronization.
Humans care about position and navigation. But our electronics and networks care about time.
This is even more critical on the moon, where large infrastructure is harder to transport and install than smaller, redundant elements that work together. Distributed sensors, databases, and comm networks, and robot swarms only work when they are synchronized.

Last Week's Theme: The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of NTNs

• Busy week at another successful Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.
• Preparing a presentation for the Rocky Mountain Photonics Summit & Expo next week on "Quantum Time Transfer." Also looking ahead at presentations and demos at the Workshop on Synchronization and Timing Systems and European Navigation Conference.
• Wrapping up a set of deliverables ahead of a May 28 preliminary design review on a funded project.
• Working to close out contract negotiations on two other projects with the goal of a May kickoff.
• New IP and partnerships in development.

• A major point of discussion at Space Symposium was the growth of new space and the need to address shortfalls:
  • The space economy is expected to grow to $1.8T by 2035, according to the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company.
  • The US Space Command believes that China is rapidly catching up to the US space capability, noting that “For the first time in decades, U.S. leadership in space and space technology is being challenged.
  • The head of the US Space Force warned that the "U.S. now contends with an “incredibly sophisticated array” of threats, such as space-based GPS jammers, anti-satellite weapons (ASATs) and cyberattacks against U.S. ground stations and space assets."
  • There is also concern that China is "actively seeking to displace GPS as the world’s dominant satnav system and, in so doing, to increase its own soft power influence."
  • To address this, the US Space Force released their first Commercial Space Strategy to “integrate commercial space solutions into military architectures wherever possible.”
  • As part of their move to work with commercial space companies, the US Department of Defense (DoD) updated its classification policy on space programs to make it easier "to grant and facilitate classification access to commercial firms that are trying to work with the government."
  • The US Space Force, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) released their 2023 State of the Space Industrial Base (SSIB) Report.
• The US “Defense Quantum Acceleration Act of 2024” bill was introduced, noting that “China has outpaced the Defense Department in terms of investment in quantum technology, dedicating $15 billion over the next five years—or $3 billion a year—as opposed to the $700 million yearly Defense Department investment.”
• The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) offers a good perspective on Demystifying Quantum: It’s Here, There and Everywhere.
• An interesting video follows a pilot as he adjusts to “No GPS from Poland to the Persian Gulf.”

• Rocky Mountain Photonics Summit & Expo, April 18, Westminster, Colorado
• Workshop on Synchronization and Timing Systems, May 7 - 9, San Diego, California
• European Navigation Conference, May 21 - 24 , Noordwijk, Netherlands
• Assured PNT Summit, May 29 - 30, National Harbor, Maryland
• IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2024, June 9-13, Denver, Colorado
• Q2B Tokyo, July 19 - 20, Tokyo, Japan
• International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN 2024), July 29-31, Hawaii, USA
• Quantum World Congress 2024, September 9 - 11, Tysons, Virginia
• World Space Business Week, September 16 - 20, Paris, France
• International Timing and Sync Forum 2024, November 4 - 7, Seville, Spain

It has been nearly 55 years since Neil Armstrong first made "one giant leap for mankind."
If Neil had stayed there, "Moon Neil" would have aged one extra second compared to "Earth Neil".
This is due to gravitational time dilation, which was originally predicted by Einstein in his general theory of relativity that tied space and time into spacetime.
In one day, a clock on the moon runs 58.7 microseconds faster than an Earth clock.
This may not seem like much. But in that time light travels nearly 18 km, which, if left uncorrected, is a huge impact to your navigation system.
This is why the US government dictated the creation of a new Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) separate from our Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) that includes:
"1. Traceability to UTC
2. Accuracy sufficient to support precision navigation and science;
3. Resilience to loss of contact with Earth; and
4. Scalability to space environments beyond the Earth-Moon system"
Other groups, including the European Space Agency, are also working on this. But it is a much harder problem than it first seems.
The obvious solution is to try to align LTC and UTC, but that is incredibly difficult across 240,000 miles.
And even clocks at different locations on the moon's surface vary widely due to its lumpy gravitational field.
A sustained lunar presence requires a dedicated LTC and lunar synchronization network.