You will never play Halo against a man on Mars. Zoe will never have your back in an interplanetary game of Left 4 Dead, and you’ll never recruit a Martian bassist for Rock Band. Online gaming between Earth and Mars is impossible.

Or is it?

With the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing behind us, space fans have wondered when we’ll take the next step – sending men and women to Mars. It’ll be a grueling journey, typically taking nine to twelve months - though technology could cut this shorter - and it’ll land them on a barren, freezing planet with nothing but rock and old rovers to greet them.

Naturally they can bring games for solo or local play. But online gaming is such a staple of modern survival that to cut it off would be devastating, if not psycho-making.

So how hard is it to stay in touch with Mars? To find out, I spoke with Chad Edwards, Chief Telecommunications Engineer for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who walked me through how their network works today, and what they’re planning for the future.

When the Mars rovers need to contact, they typically connect through one of the orbiters circling Mars. (They can also send a signal directly at a molasses-slow kilobit a second, depending on the distance). NASA has two orbiters – Odyssey, and MRO (the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter) – and you’ve also got the Mars Express, which is run by the European Space Agency. With its 100 watt transmitter and three-metre antenna, the MRO can beam data back to Earth at around one megabit per second – about what you get when your DSL’s having a bad day.

Which is still a pretty skinny pipe by Xbox Live terms. And there’s another problem: the orbiter only comes into view for about 15 minutes at a time, and then the rover has to wait a few more hours for its next shot to upload data. “A human on the surface of Mars probably isn’t going to be satisfied with 15 minutes of contact and then waiting a few hours,” says Edwards. The answer: satellites that orbit in a fixed position over the planet. Here on Earth, we call that “geostationary” orbit, but on Mars, the proper term is “areostationary” – after Ares, natch.

Humans will need more bandwidth. Edwards predicts that the first human missions will get 100 megabits a second of bandwidth –enough to carry several channels of high-definition video. The team on Mars would use it to deliver a video conference, or to beam high-def footage from the hood of their rover as they cruise by the Noachin Crater Rim. And they also need it for all their scientific instruments, which demand “very high bandwidth.”

But so does an Xbox. And that’s the bummer: there’s no way to sync up an online game from space.

Let’s start with the chief dealbreaker, the speed of light. That’s how fast our communications travel from here to Mars, and the lag amounts to about 4–20 minutes one way, depending on our orbits. As Edwards notes, any kind of conversation is impossible: “You move towards an e-mail paradigm.” And naturally, there are errors and dropouts along the way.

But get past all that, and the Mars mission will have a real communications system. “We can have the functionality of the Internet,” says Edwards, where “they know their data will get to Earth without having to worry about the details.”

So which modern day games would support this? Obviously Facebook games are a perfect fit, either with asynchronous massively single-player games of the Mobster/Mafia genre, or Flash games with competitive leaderboards. Slow and deliberative turn-based game would work, but when you figure that one turn can take 40 minutes and the Mars team might have chores to keep up with, a title should pack plenty of commands in each turn. (In fact, that’s how we drive the Mars rovers today – by giving them a series of orders in the morning and checking back in the evening to see how they did.) And while real-time massively-multiplayer worlds won’t fly, you could let players leave tracks for the folks back home to follow – like the time trials in Mirror’s Edge, where other players’ images race in front of you, or the bodies that stick around in Jesse Venbrux’s Deaths.

The first human mission isn’t on a calendar yet. NASA’s latest study, the Design Reference Mission 5.0, pegs it around 2030; and in Edwards’ mind, “that’s very optimistic.” So hey, you, the reader: we’ve got at least 20 years to figure this out. Odds are you either play games, make them, or both. What would you do to keep the new Martians happy? How would you work around lag and a tight pipe to give players the sense of contact, competition and life-saving fun they deserve?

Chris Dahlen writes about games, music, pop, and tech.  You can find him online at @savetherobot.