Slashdot Mirror
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.
"
I think the lag when playing HL2 with someone on Mars would be too much to take.
all the planets and satellites in our solar system have already Internet addresses
.anus?
So, whats the internet address for Uranus? http://ipn.myhomepage.ass ? or,
TCP is a "best effort" delivery protocol, and that's all you could hope for when latency could span minutes at a time.
What's with this newfangled internet? Don't they have UUCP?
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
"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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
There's just somethin odd about all other planets already having internet addresses. Is it just one per planet, or does each Martian get its own? I mean, one for an entire planet just doesn't seem fair, now does it?
My dingo ate your honor student.
That's all we need, is some fifteen-year-old DDoS-ing the Hubble.
evil adrian
Because we have 3 probes and a Spacestation that need internet access, right?
How about we focus on getting things out into space first, then we worry about being able to get pr0n to them?
Wben I tell the users in my office that their email vanished "somewhere into outer space" I might actually be telling the truth?
Seems like both a forward-looking and very practical idea - I personally hope to see manned stations/colonies/etc within various places in the solar system in my lifetime and it might be handy to have the ability to communicate with those places.
Mind you the scary bit would be tracking down interplanetary spammers! (The nigerian scam could become the martian scam!)
Bad news! Most of the planetary sites are occupied by squatters. For example, some snack food company is sitting on mars.com...
Unless something new is discovered, times for anything beyond moon will be high, at least, higher than most would wait. And, well, you know... most firewalls will reject martian packets.
Use fibre? No need to keep satellite antennae aligned!
I'll post something serious about the IPN when it has a practical use for the average techie.
I think the White House's new domain should be uranus.gov as to limit the lag when the cowboys in charge are looking for their heads...
Cheers,
max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
all the clans we play against will move to jupiter and get their home server there, just for the ping rapage.
Well, that's one way to prevent 40 people from submitting "repeat post" comments...
It's just that the latency from here and uranus is about three hours!
I can't wait for the Denial of Satalite attacks.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Hehe, Takes on a whole new meaning now, eh?
Hrmm, if I ping flood the north pole will I cause global flooding? Hrmm, wonder if I can just chmod the boarders to keep terrorists out.. *grin*
No I didnt spell check this post...
It was very polite of the Slashdot editors to select a story with links which avoid slashdotting Mars.
http://www.talknerdy.org
I imagine we should start calling the "Ansible" soon.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
from ip.c
This is actually a long-term project which, in 2015 (probably 2030 in reality ;) boasts a downlink of several Tbits per day to earth.
Check out the info here.
Support a Europe-related section on Slashdot!
We are of using the connetivity of IPv4 which you in Europe and them over there in Asia need better.
BigDuud: Anyone here? ;-)
(20 minutes pass)
BarsoomGirl: Just me it seems.
(20 minutes pass)
BigDuud: Wassup! I'm at Tycho City, Moon. Where you at?
(20 minutes pass)
BarsoomGirl: Utopia Planita base, Mars.
(20 minutes pass)
BigDuud: Cool! Are you nekkid?
(20 minutes pass)
BarsoomGirl: Yes, but only under my spacesuit.
(20 minutes pass)
BigDuud: Bummer.
(20 minutes pass)
BarsoomGirl: Yeah. We had a failure in the Windows2150 installation, and it caused a pressure imbalance that blew out the mail seals. I was in the shower when it happened. I'm all wet and soapy in here.
(20 minutes pass)
BigDuud: How long before it's fixed?
(20 minutes pass)
BarsoomGirl: Who knows? They admins are downloading the patch from the Redmond Arcology, but it's suposedly 50 billion terabytes for the copyright notice alone.
(20 minutes pass)
BigDuud: Bummer.
(20 minutes pass)
BarsoomGirl: This suit has a seismic vibrator, though.
(20 minutes pass)
BigDuud: Wicked! So, do you have big barsooms?
[Connection terminated. Link eclipsed by Phobos.]
--- Ban humanity.
How long til we see Venusian porn?
That depends entirely upon the location of Mars with respect to the Earth, the number of hops in between, the prevalent solar wind, etc.
:)
Ask your astrophysics professor
MORTAR COMBAT!
Newsflash
Not content with destroying web-servers, on the planet Earth, the Slashdot Effect has destroyed hundreds of servers, including one all the way up your anus.
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:
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
These uninhabited planets are getting high speed backbones? I can't get anything more than dial up where I live!
J
Abiit, excessit, evasit, erupit.
.. will be with those killer roaming charges on Grand Tour missions.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I can just see it now. Sitting on Pluto minding my own business then I see I've got mail saying "Important Information about your Cess Pit" . Means we are going to come up with a totally new set of laws for spam and tele-marketers
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
One thing Sci-Fi writers have left out when talking about spending prolonged periods in space has been access to good pr0n. Of course, for that they need newsgroup access!
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
nah, i'm sure that nasa is planning to setup web cams at various points of interest in space. of course they need ip addresses for 'em.
Now all the young inhabitants of M45S3 will be war-flying to hijack our intergalactic internet connections.
Maybe we should use something a little better than WEP...
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Perhaps with IP addresses being allocated to far remote locations the government will allocate more funding to quantum research?
Traditional methods of broadcast certainly won't be very useful over distances where light will take minutes to travel. Unless we make rapid advances and make quantum teleportation of electronic data possible, the email of today may become the snailmail of future generations.
Sure. Name one. My email address is jb (AT) twu )))DOT((( net. Mail me with a suggestion.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
how can other plants get internet if thy don't have IP laws yet?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Naw, we can scout around for the planets that have alien babes first. Interplanetary porn!
-
Moooo!!!
Would Mars be .Mars, and if so, I bet you one could persuade the famous chocolate bar company to sponsor the costs. Would look great on their marketing campaign ;)
But my Mom says I'm cool! -Milhouse
Does this mean they make little spacesuits for the carrier pidgeons now?
Hire me...
I sure as hell hope they dont plan on using IPv4 ... ;)
.. but wouldnt that be trippy?
on a side note...
maybe a zero latency network using the spin of quarks as the bits
now the hard part -- isolating and seperating matching quarks amd keeping them from phasing out of existance..
not to mention something to accurately detect the spin
ok
maybe i'm full of sh*t
sending data instantaneously regardless of distance...
who knows.. maybe another hundred years or two and we'll be able to instantaneously be able to phase matter in and out of 'existance' in any position in our 4d space-time at will by tapping into all 11 dimentions...
p r m t h s
This brings a whole new meaning to A/S/L
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
Pinging www.yahoo.akadns.net [64.58.76.226] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 64.58.76.226: bytes=32 time=300000ms TTL=245
Like we do not already have a shortage of IP adresses for one planet already. Screw IPv6, we need IPv8 now instead to deal with this! 1,3407807929942597099574024998206e+154 IP adresses ought to be enough for ever space ship, space station and coffee machine in the future! (Don't quote me on that in 20 years, PLEASE!!!)
Hate me!
What's that you say? The packets take too long to traverse the solar system?
No problemo. Just use a new transmission carrier -- tachyons!
Now your computer downloads ad pop-ups before you click that link! Ain't technology wonderful?
Yet more proof of American oppression of the Martians.. just look at all the propogana movies they produced last century - they're getting the public ready for an invasion. I mean, the Martians don't just have have biological WMD, they are WMD (microbes)!!
It is nice that NASA is developing a communication protocol for use in their missions. It seems to have some advantages: only low-power transmitters are needed on space crafts if you have a retransmitting satellite hub around. (This is in fact done already - in missions that use a lander, the part of the ship that stays in orbit retransmit signals of the lander). Using a standardized protocol, the hubs can be used for many missions, even simultaneously.
I wish the article on space.com had focussed on this a bit more instead of popularising it by mentioning Vint Cerf and the Internet. Everyone will realize that the infrastructure is not connected to the Internet (imagine - hacked satellite, DoS attacks). Also, the protocol, which can handle large delays, will have significant differences to regular TCP/IP.
Also, I'd like to know how to NASA will solve a few problems that jump to mind. The communication hubs are only useful if they are close to the sending spacecraft. The hubs can not be put halfway earth and a planet, because of the planets rotation around the sun. So the hub would have to circle around a planet in order for future missions to that particular planet can use it.
But then NASA faces the following problems: on planets with an atmosphere, the hubs will tend to fall to the surface, so in many cases they need fuel to keep their altitude.
Secondly, the hub will only be visible from one side of the planet at the time.
Thirdly, the hub needs power, where to get it from for an extended period of time? Or are the hubs only short lived? In that case, why bother at all?
My karma ran over your dogma
Hehehe... I like how you spam proofed your email in the post even though it's plainly posted beside your userid in the /. message header.
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
I am surprised no one has mentioned all these neat FTL communications technologies people seem to be developing.
-
Moooo!!!
I can see it now, they'll all subscribe to get THE first post form Mars or the moon.
The link to my column about "The Interplanetary Internet" is http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2003/05/05.html, and not http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2003/05/04.html, which refers to another story. Sorry about the mistake. If Hemos or another member of the editorial committee of Slashdot reads this, please apply the correction. Many thanks in advance. Roland Piquepaille.
The ping time to Venus SUX
If you send the messages faster than light for half the trip. Gain latency on one side, lose it on the other. Zero lag.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
becasue it is difficult to communicate from a ship to earth while it is at the orbit of jupiter and since we will have that rocket power in the next 30 years to be able to get to jupiter in 9 months we need to deploy communication ubs so that the comunications can be sent to a hub and routed to earth rather than the ship having to maintain earths location all throughout the trip.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The first detection of intelligent extraterrestrial life will be an unpassworded AirPort Base Station called "androme2135".
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Btw, the IP address to that one military satellitwe, the one armed with nuclear missiles, yea, that one. The IP address is 127.1.34.46 Have fun!
Question everything.
Surprised that no one seems to have mentioned this book, as part of it deals with conjecture as to how a universe-wide Internet might work.
Now here's where we'd notice a huge difference w/ nice Squid caches/proxies.
Guess we'll have to change that one once IPN is a reality...
"Inflammable means flammable? What a strange country!" -Dr. Nick, The Simpsons
I've been waiting for some off-planet colo space to start my gambling and pr0n server farm. Try to stop me now, you damn lawyers and politicians!
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
For all the whining about latency times, I don't see anyone looking for solutions! Check this out:
Quantum Networking. By using photons with quantum entanglement, it's possible to transmit data from Earth to Mars with nearly no latency.
Of course, we need a few good engineers to make it practical...
I wonder what might come of this in respect to data havens, if you can evade the law on an oil rig with at least minor success, I wonder what you could do on a satellite or another planet. Also, who will control the the data flow? Some damn good encryption might be necessary.
-Silmarildur
If they already had IP's some L33t h4x0r would have already DDoS'd Jupiter and caused it to crash
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
We'll probably have to set up a differential TTL system for IPs associated with Off-planet resources.
Imagine posting the URL to Jupiter's first web-cam on slashdot. A little over an hour after you click the link, you find out it's been down for 30 minutes.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
> shouldn't we worry about interplanetary TRAVEL first?
Not necessarily. If we just drop a large variety of internet-connected hardware (hopefully mobile & wireless) onto a planet (before we get there in person) individuals can learn a whole lot and do their own observing and find all sorts of interesting things. Let's say you like looking at stars through your 50x telescope. Now imagine being able to use the Hubble (well, maybe one that works better) to look at the "same things."
I realize that this equipment would not be available to the public to control, but it's the thought that counts (when doesn't it).
"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."
Wouldn't a series of switches be better? It seems it would be a better idea to increase those collision domains...
4LL tH353 WORLds @re YOUr5--3xcEPt EUrOP4. 4++3MPt n0 L4NdINg5 THerE
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
...for once, the guys who keep complaining of a lag kill might actually be telling the truth!
--- "...And everybody died!!! Except for me, of course...you know why? Because I had my tray table up...and my seat ba
Since we are addressing Internet issues of the universe now, lets deal with interplanetary spam laws in our own solar system first. :-)
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
GREETINGS EARTHLING,
I HAVE AN IMPORTANT BUSINESS PROPOSITION FOR YOU. SHORTLY BEFORE THE MOST RECENT MARTIAN CIVIL WAR, I HAD 37,000,000 (37 MILLION) MARTIAN GORANS SITTING IN THE FIRST BANK OF MARS. HOWEVER, NOW THAT THE BLUE THARK HAVE TAKEN OVER THE MARTIAN GOVERNMENT, I HAVE NO WAY OF GETTING MY MONEY OIFF THE PLANET.
PLEASE PROVIDE ME WITH YOUR BANK ACCOUNT NUMBER SO I CAN TRANSFER THE FUNDS TO EARTH, AND I WILL BE GIVE YOU HALF THE 37 MILLION GORANS, WHICH IS WORTH OVER 50,000,000 (50 MILLION) OF YOUR EARTH DOLLARS. YOUR IMMEDIATE ATTENTION AND DISCRETION IN THIS MATTER IS GREATLY APPRECIATED.
- GENERAL GURLAK ZORGOFF
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
So, how will this latency effect slashdot first post? :) Will there be a race to the main database, or will someone who had first post lose it when absolute time data is finally received?
-Alex
It's not easy for a Martian to get first post, thanks to the lag. But I think I finally did it!
Oh, that's nice, why don't you try to get spammers to spam me. That's a great way to get someone to take your advice.
Wake up and smell the Clue.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
No! I mean seriously would you go some place that has no internet access for an extended stay? Life without slashdot, just because you have posted on this site suggests to me that you need your slashdot, is just un-thinkable. Yes it will be an extended stay for the time and expense traveling to another planet you'd better be staying a few months.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Now we just need to put some more planets under our control... piece of cake.
Will take place in the IPN.
Quake war:
Mars vs. Earth
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Great! All we have to do now is colonize other planets.
Yes, games are out, the round trip time being more half an hour to Mars. On a slightly more practical note, instant messaging won't be fun either.
Nor will any protocol based on TCP, or any other handshaking or window/retransmissin error-correction scheme (unless you're willing to wait a LONG time for your data).
We'll need something with serious forward error correction. And a lot of the fundamental components of the net will need a rethink before they're usable by humans at even lunar distances.
For starters, web browsing will need a local cache - of essentially the whole internet. Think spiders and massive archives, and serious redesign on sites with dynamic content.
But the pipes are necessarily too small for optimistically broadcasting everything - even if it doesn't change milisecond-by-milisecond. Serious filtering.
And most of the data for sites is the images in the ads. That just HAS to get filtered down - as will other images. Boon or bane?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Nothing like the /. effect to bring unfriendly planets back into line.
One gets the impression from the blurb that each planet gets an Internet address...
Wouldn't a Planetary NAT box be a bit too much of a hack?
Maybe it's just the wording...
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
So, whats the internet address for Uranus? http://ipn.myhomepage.ass ? or, .anus?
Reminds me of when Uranus' faint rings were first discovered. Headline:
IS THERE A RING OF DEBRIS AROUND URANUS?
Probably missed because the "correct" pronunciation is "YOUR-ah-nus".
Right up there with "MILK DRINKERS TURN TO POWDER".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This was set up back in 1993. However it is for the Solar System only, so it needs further expanding.
I'm not sure they've explained exactly how to turn the quantum-entanglement into a communications device. In order to "observe" an entangled state you must "touch" it in some way. Doesn't this break the entanglement?
... the miliatary would love this as it would make cypher obsolete. Not only that, but submarines could communicate with HQ without having to approach the surface, AND unlike now ... they could talk back without being detected.
It seems to me that a terrestrial "quantum telegraph" would be a practical first step. Not only that, it would probably be VERY, VERY profitable wireless transmisionless satellite free, comm nodes. Come to think of it
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
will this replace /dev/null with /dev/blackhole. Now we can pipe all spam to the nearest blackhole.
monopolies are great.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
www.nakeduranushotties.com
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
You haven't seen SPAM lords until you've been to Vega.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
The increase in Windows version numbers is exponential (3, 95, 2000, ...). By the time 2150 rolls around, I fully expect to be at Windows Avogadro.
It is impossible to send useful information faster than light as this would be against a basic law of relativity.
The only thing you're guaranteed is that once the state of one photon is collapsed then its entagled photon is as well. You have no control over what state said photons are collapsed to, just that they will go to opposite states from one another.
I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
Happy people make bad consumers.
This will end power shortages. We can just launch solar power plants, and download the power using EoIP.
And if there are problems with centering antennae, we could just use IPoAC.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
I am afraid this will introduce latencies remniscent of RFC 1149.
64 bytes from 10.0.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=6165731.1 ms...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
look at the time it took before i submitted this story and it actually showed up
2001-05-24 23:44:17 msnbc has a serious story about an interplanetary (articles,news) (rejected)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Im not very well versed in physics but I remember many years ago hearing that somehow you could split an atom or part of an atom so that you had two electrons and no matter what distance they were seperated by, change in spin of one electron would be duplicated by the other. I remember thinking that if you could alter the spin fast enough and read it reliably, this could be used as a wireless modem technology. I beleive the backstory of earth and beyond mentions this technology as well. Does anyone know the term for this and if it would ever be technologicaly feasable?
Telnet / ssh are going to be hell with the latency issues. Type a character, wait a month, type a character, wait a month....
Remember,
Einstein wasn't concerned with transmission of information. He was concerned with transmission of energy, matter and gravity.
Einstein never gave quantum mechanics it's due. His saying was "God does not place dice". Einstein firmly believed in a stable deterministic reality. Well, it's very plain and obvious now that god DOES play dice and not just on a sub-atomic scale.
Relativity does not preclude quantum entanglement from the simple fact that relativity does not consider quantum phenomenon. Basically, no transmission is involved, they're simply trying to take advantage of a little quirk in the universe to communicate WITHOUT transmission.
BTW, we are also finding out now that the law of relativity in incomplete. Some researchers have developed ways of pushing light through select mediums at FASTER than the speed of light. They haven't explained the physics yet, they just observed (and replicated) the phenomenon.
It doesn't seem to make sense or rekon with our Einsteinian physics. However, once upon a time the notion of light having constant speed regardless of frame of reference was absoluetly maddening. Newton did not describe this, how could Newton be wrong?? Obviously he wasn't, Einstein's equations reduce to Newton when your in the same frame of reference. I presume that when the physics are discovered to explain super-c light, that they'll reduce to Einstein.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
It won't be long until we have www.pr0n.mars
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
And I used to laugh (not in their presence at least) at people (What's a mouse? Is this a cupholder?) who said they "had the Internet on their PC."
*snort* The whole> Internet?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Why hasn't anyone made a reference to the Ansible network yet?????? damn it, where did all the geeks go?
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
What's the point of creating an Internet infrastructure accros a solar system if we haven't even finished the one here, on Earth.
... they should use the technology to improve the internet here.
Seems like a waste of money and resources
So now those broken packets will have to come from somewhere else?
(other than Mars?)
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Vincent Cerf... who is often referred to as the "father of the Internet."
Really? I thought Tim Berners-Lee was considered the father of the Internet. Or is there something going on here that we don't want to know about?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore through the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe--ninety-six billion planets--into the supercircuit that would connect them all into the one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.
Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then, after a moment's silence, he said, "Now, Dwar Ev."
Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.
Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. "The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn."
"Thank you," said Dwar Reyn. "It shall be a question that no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer."
He turned to face the machine. "Is there a God?"
The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of single relay.
"Yes, now there is a God."
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.
A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.*
check this out. it's NASA's space protocol suite....
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.
One step at a time hey guys? Lets colonise the damn planets first!
NASA has for several years been trying to get 'IP in Space' to be practical. This approach overlooks an important aspect, which is that bandwidth to space is difficult and expensive. That's why we don't have it now. There is a reason the Deep Space Network (DSN) requires huge antennas and depends on line of site, and has a very low bandwidth (~300 baud) -- that's what it takes to get the message through. Adding relay Spacecraft nodes to improve visibility of target Spacecraft is a good idea, but more expensive than just building the target Spacecraft. And using up more of that precious (expensive!) bandwidth in packetizing protocols just increases the expense. NASA built the world's first ground wide area network (the DSN) to support Gemini and Apollo -- and it does not use TCP/IP. Nasa launched the TDRS satellites (ala Arthur C. Clarke) to provide communication relays for earth satellites to DSN -- and THEY don't use TCP/IP. Currently, we NEED the efficiencies provided by the simple DSN network protocol. Maybe one day, launch weight to orbit will be less important, or we'll have super high efficiency and low cost transmitters and receivers and processors so we'll have 'spare' bandwidth to apply to this flexibility. But that day is not now.
I happen to work 15 feet from Vint's Office and this has been a pet project of his for years. The TCP jokes are funny and all, but they have some of the smartest people on the planet creating new protocols especially for the Interplanetary Internet.
n etary_internet/
Check out Vint's own website for more info.. http://global.mci.com/resources/cerfs_up/interpla
TequilaMokingbird
'You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.'