NASA New Horizons wake-up spotlights deep-space comms gap still out of investor reach
NASA’s New Horizons mission is showing how far commercial space communications still have to go. The agency’s Near Space Network handles missions as far as 2 million km from Earth, but New Horizons is about 9.5 billion km out. That’s around 4,750 times farther than the edge of NASA’s current commercial network. The agency buys commercial direct-to-Earth and relay services only within that range.