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

Ping Times

[ackthpt]

"I wonder what the ping times would be like..."

They could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.

News to Look Forward To:

Air Force Get Signal - 'CATS: AYBABTU' Spend $$$,$$$,$$$'s researching origin

TSAT 0wn3d

Alan Ralsky sentenced to Abu Ghraib for routing spam through TSAT

TSAT loses orbit, crushes Tom Cruise on eve of War Of The Worlds opening

Mischevious Glac-Elves use TSAT to spread Irata Worm

Air Force officer notices TSAT looks canoe-shaped before realizing contract made with wrong Grumman

Warfighters welcome their new Space Routing Overlord

Re:Ping Times

[chadjg]

I could actually respect a spammer that had the "guts" to route their spam through a server owned by a group that could unload a platoon of M1A2s on his front lawn and permanently crush everything in sight in about 2 seconds.

Please God... Thou has made me bald and without charm. Pleae give this one thing.

first post via space router

[Anonymous Coward]

first po
NO CARRIER

Woohoo...

[It doesn't come easy]

Gonna need a hell of a long patch cable...

Ping times.

[grub]

I wonder what the ping times would be like...

(nb: I worked on some satellite internet stuff a few years ago.) If this unit is in geosynchronous orbit (so a fixed dish can always hit it), it's sitting almost 36,000 Km over the equator. Assuming your dish is at the equator a round trip is ~72,000 Km / 300,000 Km/sec (the speed of light) means the signal travels about a quarter second earth->earth not including any processing time at the satellite midway point or either end.

How to harden a router.

[BeProf]

Wrap it in tinfoil?

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.

2AM

[CypherXero]

(Phone Rings)
Boss: The router went down, we need you to fix it...now.
You: Fuck.

Dropped packets.

[BeProf]

So what happens to dropped packets? Do they burn up on re-entry or go into an orbit?

Encryption

[AviLazar]

Now don't forget guys: Make sure to use WEP encryption keys and turn on your MAC filtering and change the default IP and password. And for god's sake, change the SSID from linksys to something else.