The Interplanetary Internet

Roland Piquepaille writes "This article from SPACE.com about the Interplanetary Internet (IPN) is not science fiction. It is becoming a reality, Rich Gray reports. "The IPN would form a backbone connecting a series of hubs on or around planets, ships, and at other points in space. These hubs would provide high-capacity, high-availability Internet traffic over distances that could stretch up to hundreds of millions of miles." Gray adds that all the planets and satellites in our solar system have already Internet addresses and that NASA is already communicating with its earth-orbiting missions through its internal Deep Space Network. The rest of us will have to wait until at least 2005 when IPN-equipped satellites are launched. Check this column for more details. You also can read a previous Slashdot column on the same subject. "

Comments

Great

[JanneM]

"To boldly Slashdot where nobody has Slashdotted before."

While network infrastructure will be working at lower levels, there will of course never be any kind of interactivity - expect new legal fun and games as the need to cache and bulk send stuff to local mirrors collides with steadily more draconian IP laws.

Lots of Great uses

[flogger]

For science. Look at our data recording of various solar bodies. We have to send up a satelite to orbit the planet, say Neptune. This satelite takes its readings and can only report back to earth when there is direct lne of site. With Neptune, this doesn't happen that often. If there were a "hub" system of Interplanetary TCP/IP set up, this satelite on Neptune could send the info via Jupiter --> Mars --> Venus -->Earth.
Now once these hubs are set up, Communications would not rely on Line of site; interplanetory travel could "talk" with mission control from anywhere on the journey.
Some Sci-Fi:

• Traverse 12:Mission Control, Commander Meichiko just gave birth to a fine son, Akira. ... There were some complications. Meickiko's Uterus ruptures when the placenta detatched. She's now stable. What do you reccomend?
• Mission Control: Traverse 12. We read you. Congradulations. We are sending you the data from Commanders Meichiko's Reproductive files. From this you should be able to print out a new uterus on your HP BioJet 9800.

Re:Hm.

[clarkcox3]

They'll just have to rely on NAT like the rest of us do.

That actually makes a lot of sense, have a huge router per planet, with NAT, that batches the outgoing TCP/IP packets into large (i.e. multi-gigabyte) packets, which are split back into their TCP/IP packets at the receiving end on some other planet. That way, the effects of latencies measured in hours on the actual throughput could be minimized.