Artemis II — NASA's first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972 — will rely on two distinct communications networks to maintain contact between the spacecraft and Earth. The Near Space Network, managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, handles communications in the Earth-to-lunar-distance range. The Deep Space Network, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, provides coverage for the deeper segments of the trajectory. That dual-network architecture is the entirety of the factual content from NASA — a single sentence that names the two systems and their managing centres. The structural significance is in what those two networks represent. The Deep Space Network (DSN) is one of NASA's oldest and most critical pieces of infrastructure. Its three ground station complexes — in Goldstone (California), Madrid (Spain), and Canberra (Australia) — are spaced roughly 120 degrees apart around the globe so that at least one station can communicate with any spacecraft at any time. The DSN was built in the 1960s and has been continuously upgraded since, but it serves every deep space mission NASA operates: Voyager, Mars rovers, New Horizons, Juno, and now Artemis. It is capacity-constrained and has been for years. The Near Space Network (NSN), managed by Goddard, is the newer system. It handles communications for missions in near-Earth space — low Earth orbit through cislunar distances. The NSN includes NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS) and commercial ground station partnerships. For Artemis II, the NSN covers the mission phases when Orion is closer to Earth, while the DSN takes over for the lunar transit and lunar vicinity phases. The dual-network design is a resilience architecture. By splitting communications responsibility between two independently managed networks at two different NASA centres, the mission avoids a single point of failure in its communications chain. If one network has a ground station outage, the other provides coverage for its segment of the trajectory. The trade-off is coordination complexity — two separate management structures must synchronise handoffs as the spacecraft transitions between network coverage zones. The infrastructure question beneath this announcement is whether these networks — particularly the DSN — can scale to support Artemis's ambitions. Artemis II is one crewed mission. Artemis III and beyond envision regular crewed lunar operations, a lunar Gateway station, and eventually sustained presence on the lunar surface. Each of those missions needs communications. The DSN is already serving dozens of active missions. Without significant capacity expansion, the communications infrastructure becomes the bottleneck for the programme's pace.
