Moon landing live stream
ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and Aidan Cowley in space suits taking and analyzing samples during an exercise in a realistic lunar environment at the LUNA facility in Germany. | © Photo: ESA/DLR – M. Diegeler

Moon landing live stream

6. June 2025 | by Thorsten Naeser

The next time astronauts land on the moon, we will be there live on Earth. And all in high-definition. The transmission will be in color, digital and with up to 60 frames per second. To ensure that this works, data specialists from the European Space Agency (ESA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have tested the technical requirements for this in an artificial lunar landscape at the LUNA research center in Cologne.

Humanity is heading for the moon again. When astronauts set foot on the Earth's satellite again, the rest of humanity will be there live. Half a century after astronauts first set foot on the lunar surface, space communication experts are now preparing the best possible coverage. Nothing should be left to chance. That is why ESA and DLR have carried out a simulated moon walk in front of a realistic lunar backdrop at the LUNA facility near Cologne. The space agencies will use the images from the test run as a reference for future operations on the lunar surface.

ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer wears a space suit and holds a prototype of the camera that will be used on the moon during a test in a realistic lunar environment at the LUNA facility in Germany. Photo: ESA/DLR - M. Diegeler

The Apollo missions in the late 1970s and early 1980s produced iconic images - grainy, slightly distorted, but nevertheless spectacular. The quality of the transmission for the next landing on the moon will of course be better than the film footage from that time. But the data professionals still have to contend with the same difficult conditions, such as bandwidth, signal delays, moonlight and the omnipresent dust.

Still image from the live television broadcast of the Apollo 11 moon walk on July 20, 1969. Apollo 11 was the first mission to land astronauts on the moon. Photo: NASA

You want to be prepared. The exercise at the LUNA Center in Cologne was not about creating fake moon shots. The team worked on developing realistic test clips, ranging from simple procedures to scenes with a lot of movement. The footage shows astronauts leaving a landing module, exploring the moon and even taking a selfie on the moon to capture the reflection on the helmet visor.

To ensure quality and compatibility, experts from 28 nations are involved in these preparations to try out different encoding and transmission methods to ensure video quality and the handling of data from space, among other things.

Photographer Melanie Cowan, was thrilled when she set foot on Europe's moon for the first time. “I got an impression of what it could be like there. It's as close to reality as you can get. It was a challenging experience filming and photographing in this surreal environment,” she says.

Photography expert Melanie Cowan wears protective clothing during a simulated moon walk at the LUNA facility in Germany. The protective suits prevent the dust from sticking to her clothes and hair and from being inhaled. Photo: ESA/DLR - M. Diegeler

Melanie wore protective clothing to prevent the dust from sticking to her clothes and hair and to avoid breathing it in. Moon dust is one of the biggest challenges during filming. Every step on the moon stirs up dust particles that float in the air and distort the images.

“We tried different lighting techniques to recreate the light of the sun on the moon. We investigated the effects of shadows from rocks and craters,” continues Melanie Cowan.

Sending videos from the moon is not quite as easy as uploading them to YouTube. The main constraints on lunar transmissions are size and power consumption. The equipment needs to be lightweight, energy efficient and resistant to extreme temperature fluctuations.

Past Apollo missions used microwave frequencies that required 20,000 watts of power to send signals to the moon. The command module and lunar module had small antennas and a small transmitter with a power of only 20 watts. To compensate, the large antennas of the Deep Space Network on Earth tracked the journey to the moon.

Another challenge is the signal delay. A radio signal needs 1.3 seconds to travel from the moon to earth. The ESA is now planning to put five satellites into orbit around the moon. One of them will ensure communication at a high data rate so that we can be there live when the great adventure on the moon begins again.