This was the first ship-to-ship communications ever to take place in space. #NASA (ISS to Artemis)

[Swede]

How cool is that?

Yesterday, the crew of the ISS called the crew of #Artemis2 and had a short conversation in between their busy schedules of research and documentation (I promise, to a scientist, that's more fun than it sounds!)

This was the first ship-to-ship communications ever to take place in space. #NASA

— Jessý Potato (@markdownhandsup.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T08:54:43.063Z

[Nittersing]

1. That's a pretty cool milestone. nt

[riversedge]

2. I never had thought about it but I suspose I had assumed they could always communite

amongst other ships in space.

Learn something new everyday

[displacedvermoter]

3. I would have thought there would have been

a symbolic communication with one of the Russian crews over the years. Cool first, I agree.

[lastlib]

4. I have to challenge this...

The Soviet Union did it in 1962 with Vostok 3 and 4, launched a day apart, and coming within a few kilometers of each other. They did communicate with each other during their approach.

Maybe it depends on what you count, but there have been numerous times that the US program has had two vehicles that might've communicated with each other. The Apollo program, with command and lunar modules separated, presented opportunities for ship-to-ship communication. Gemini 6 & 7 did the first US in-space rendezvous of manned ships, and it's hard to imagine that the two didn't exchange communication.

So no, the ISS/Artemis isn't the first.

[Kid Berwyn]

6. Later that decade, Gemini VII and VI...

They gabbed and gabbed…

[lastlib]

7. Yeah, I mentioned that, but wasn't sure.....

...(and couldn't verify directly) that it was actually ship-to-ship, without ground connection. I was only eight at the time, and my memory of the details of what went on are hazy to non-existent.

[Kid Berwyn]

9. Good point about ship-to-ship vs ground stations 'n' satellites...

Remember Apollo-Soyuz in 1975? Deke Slayton finally got to go into space at the cost of his leaving as head of the Astronaut Office at NASA -- clearing the way for solid rocket motors being OK'd as an integral part of the Shuttle launch system and now the Artemis booster. If you haven't read it, Joseph and Susan Trento tell the story in "Prescription for Disaster: From the Glory of Apollo to the Betrayal of the Shuttle."



Above Thomas Stafford (Apollo 10 lunar landing dry-run) and Aleksei Leonov (first man to walk in space) shake hands in the tunnel linking their two spacecraft. Interesting times to grow up, the Space Age.

[lastlib]

10. I have vivid memory of the Apollo-Soyuz handshake!

I was just graduated from high school, and the US Navy was REALLY after me to enlist. I was watching Apollo/Soyuz getting ready to join up and do their handshake, and just as they were getting ready to open the hatch, the damn recruiter called me! We had a wall-mounted phone with a not-very-long cord to the handset, so I couldn't see the TV and talk on the phone at the same time. Recruiter said he hoped I was considering the Navy; naturally, I wanted to get RID of this guy and watched the mission, so I said sure, just send a ship around to get me, and I'll sign right up. Slammed the receiver in his ear, hung up and went back just in time to see them do the handshake. Never heard from the recruiter again, and of course the ship didn't come up my hill, so I never signed up.

[Kid Berwyn]

11. A NASA Rabbit Hole

While the recruiters let this then-young hippie be: I, too, grew up during the race to the moon days.

An online resource for those who enjoy the exploration of space:

https://www.nasa.gov/a-to-z-of-nasa-missions/#G

Imagine if we had invested money into space exploration instead of destroying Vietnam and whoever else was in the way of colonial resource extraction?

[lastlib]

13. Oh, god, YES!

Healthcare and education would be free, a basic income would be guaranteed! And we would have the international space base on the moon!

That's a cool site, BTW! Thanks for passing it along!

[tinrobot]

5. Don't the ships docking with the ISS communicate as well?

Wouldn't that also qualify as "ship to ship" communication?

[Mysterian]

12. That's what I was thinking too.

I think this is a bogus claim.

[EarlG]

8. Spacecraft have certainly communicated with one another in space before now, but

the Scientific American article explains this first more clearly:

This exchange between the Artemis II crew and astronauts onboard the International Space Station marks the first time a moon mission has called an orbital habitat

At the time of the last manned moon missions in the early '70s, there were no orbital habitats.