NASA's phone line to space just got a bigger antenna
NASA just switched on a new 114-foot dish at its Goldstone, California complex, boosting the Deep Space Network that talks to Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Mars rovers and 40+ other spacecraft. Why the upgrade? The network is jammed: astronaut missions like Artemis automatically get priority over robotic probes, squeezing everyone else's bandwidth. The new antenna, already tracking the Chandra X-ray Observatory, is part of a project that started in 2009 and has ballooned 68% over budget to $706 million.
Why it matters
As NASA preps a permanent Moon Base and more countries launch deep-space missions, the DSN is the single bottleneck everyone shares. If astronauts always jump the queue, robotic science missions like Voyager could get less airtime just as demand keeps climbing.