US Air Force Building Space Router

Saint Aardvark writes "From the ISTS daily news comes a story on the US Air Force seeking to build a space router. From TFA: "Northrop Grumman and Caspian Networks are collaborating to develop an Internet Protocol router that can withstand the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit. The space-hardened IP router will be part of the Air Force's Transformational Satellite Communications System, which will provide IP-based communications to warfighters." I wonder what the ping times would be like..."

Comments

What's so special about routers?

[hazee]

Every satelite up there has to withstand "the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit". If the communications, or video or whatever got scrambled, then they wouldn't be a whole lot of use.

So what's so special about a router?

Re:What's so special about routers?

[TheFlyingGoat]

If you set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around Mars, you wouldn't need line of sight to get the data from a rover back to Earth. You could do this with just a repeater, though.

It gets interesting as we spread out more and more. You can set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around each planet, and data has a much more likely chance of getting back to Earth. You can relay pictures of the stars from Mars to Earth when it's on the other side of the sun.

You can also send satellites out past Pluto, and if you have a router in orbit around Pluto, there's a good chance for it to relay the signal back to Saturn, Neptune, or Uranus. Then those can relay it back closer and so on. It's much better than the laser aligned communications we use now, where the satellite needs a direct line back to Earth.

Re:What's so special about routers?

[querencia]

Exactly! Communications satellites have on-board computers and thousands of transponders. Preparing electronics for the rigors of space is now a well-understood practice. There is no reason that a router should be any different from any of the other equipment, should there?

I suppose it is interesting that you could have packets routed between war planes without needing ground-based network services. Not sure why it's necessary, but interesting.

universal IP network

[alphakappa]

Maybe this is a sign of things to come. As we send spacecrafts to Mars and other planets (and someday planets beyond our solar system), the InterPlanetary Internet will need such routers. A router satellite followed by routers in space and on other planets would create a nice little backbone to base our communications on. There would be one hell of a delay, but we could send our spacecrafts farther and farther away without losing the ability to communicate.

Re:How to harden a router.

[3rd_Floo]

I know this was a joke, but just to give some extra insight to some rad hardening perticulars... Tinfoil would not be enough, creating efficient Rad hardened electronics is an interesting problem. Not only do you have to deal with simple EM types of interference, but the possibility of radiation flipping the bit stored in a register. Typically parallel processors that do redundant checks on data, multipath techniques and other sharing and swarm-consensus types of architectures would be employed. This is the preferred method because strapping a big honking metal plate is MUCH more costly, just to negate rad effects. Although they would still have to shield it against small-debris impacts.

Re:Ping time

[gik]

Fast enough to play Halo 2. Fast enough to kill sandniggers. Good enough for us.

BTW, thanks god, for wiping out 200,000 of the monkeys for us. Really saved us some time.

Sometimes I let slashdot fool me into thinking all the people who read/post stories/replies here are all the same kinds of geeks, like me.

It's people like you who remind me how wholly different I am from, for example, someone as shit-brained as you.

Re:If your'e not underneath it

[Rei]

2 seconds? Since a TCP handshake requires 3 packets (although you can start right after you send the third packet), with a 2 second delay, that would mean 4 seconds minimum to initialize a TCP connection. Definitely not trivial.

SSL would be a bigger delay - 2 seconds for the client's settings packet to arrive at the server, 2 seconds for the server's settings and certificate to arrive at the client, 2 seconds for the master secret to get sent to the server, then (assuming that the client's confirmation isn't the holdup) 2 seconds for the server's confirmation that it will be now be using the encrypted connection, and then lastly 2 seconds for the first bit of client data to make it to the server. 10 seconds total - ouch!

Re:Ping Times

[TheGavster]

How do you propose DoS'ing someone on an independant network based on vulnerabilities in their network protocol?

Re:Ping Times

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Actually they do have the A-10 Warthog. It's the first (and thusfar only) fixed wing aircraft the US inventory that was designed primarily for ground assault.

What building could say "no" to a 30mm gatling gun firing at 3900 rounds per minute?