6G at frac16g: The Future of Cislunar Communications

What will the future of cislunar communications be? The ever-expanding horizons of the space exploration missions, and the need for establishing sustainable space communication and navigation infrastructure necessitate to think this question thoroughly. In this article, we examine how some of the concepts of 6G technologies developed for terrestrial networks can be relevant in the context of cislunar networks. We discuss how 6G concepts, such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, quantum-resistant physical layer security, private information read/write/cache networks, semantic and goal-oriented communications, information freshness based quality of communication metrics, multi-relay and cooperative networks, hold the potential to shape the future of cislunar communications.