Because Nokia is among the largest base station and radio gear builders in the world and also one of the biggest R&D people in the area. You want something experimental? Call Nokia, Ericson or so on.

Plus Nokia has connections to USA, since they bought Lucent Technologies aka the old radio hardware side of AT&T. AT&T Bell Labs is these days Nokia Bell labs, since they took ownership as part of the Lucent deal.

In fact the project is headed on Nokia's side by Nokia Bell labs, since it's an experimental R&D project.

They are putting LTE on Moon.... Nokia was one of the companies who invented and developed LTE in the first place. They make LTE base stations. Whole point also kinda is: LTE is industry standard. If they use something like LTE, multitude of companies and players can join in expanding the network. Since it's standard LTE. We do LTE Roaming and so on here on Earth all the time. It is network designed for interoperability, instead of singular proprietary network. Upon which time one is at the mercy of the whims and success of the single proprietary supplier. Plus LTE has the desired needed bandwidth amounts.

NASA could next contract with Ericson and the Ericson base station and Nokia base station know how to talk to each other.