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From the site you referenced http://www.scps.org/scps/html/related_links.html:

While the SCPS protocol suite enables terrestrial networks to extend into cislunar space, extending the internet to reach other planets requires new techniques. In 1998, DARPA funded the JPL/MITRE/SPARTA SCPS team to explore how an Interplanetary Internet might be designed. Dr. Vint Cerf joined the team, and a number of new concepts were explored.

The primary challenge was in dealing with light-time delays to other planets - minutes or even hours could elapse between a signal and its acknowledgement. It soon became evident that if one could deal with minutes or hours of delay caused by interplanetary distances, the same techniques could be equally useful for dealing with delays caused by disconnection or other comm link disruption.

In recent years, this work has been generalized and brought into the Internet Research Task Force as a Working Group on Delay (or Disruption) Tolerant Networking. For further information see: http://www.dtnrg.org/

What a useless article; there's absolutely no technical data at all. How is IPN implemented? Does the protocol differ largely from SCPS (pronounced "skips") which is already a defined standard based on TCP/IP and in widespread use? http://www.scps.org/scps/ I expect a higher caliber article from a Slashdot post... oh yeah, nevermind.

Eeeeyup, that's called the bandwidth delay product and shows how much could be in the pipeline at any given time. This is what the TCP "window" value is for, and since most TCP implementations max out with a TCP window size around 64 kB, this means that TCP is very poor for space communications. Even TCP links over geosynchronous satellites (in 'stationary' earth orbits) have trouble when the bandwidth is high. And certainly in a deep-space application TCP is silly, due to the BWP and of course the TCP handshaking delay.

Which is why JPL invented the Space Communications Protocol.

Space Communications Protocol Standards (SCPS)

http://www.scps.org/

http://www.scps.org/Documents/SCPSoverview.PDF

Space Communications Protocol Standards (SCPS)

http://www.scps.org/

http://www.scps.org/Documents/SCPSoverview.PDF

check this out. it's NASA's space protocol suite....

Some interesting links:
Future:
Interplanetary Internet (IPN)
IP in Space

Now:
SCPS gateway runs on FreeBSD
SCPS: Space Communications Protocol Standards

Nobody is going to wait for an SCPS packet to return an authentication token when visiting Mars or perhaps something slightly more distant in the 'Universe' such as the nearest star.

So long as the universe is bigger than a planet, we have no worries about this 'Universal login' concept ever becoming 'truly universal'.

Yeah, we'll use SCPS.

It needs to be integrated into the IETF's work, but there have been people working on just this sort of problem from the point of view of the CCSDS (a group which handles earth-to-space data protocols):

http://www.scps.org