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NASA Looking for Bandwidth Sponsorship
Neil Halelamien writes "A news release and MSNBC's Cosmic Log report that NASA has a web sponsorship opportunity for companies in return for providing bandwidth support for the two upcoming Space Shuttle missions of Discovery and Atlantis. The missions, scheduled for this summer, are expected to cause 20 to 30 million web site visits each and up to a half million streaming video feeds. The alternative is for NASA to cap the number of visitors. Sponsorship proposals are being accepted through April 13."
The link entitled "MSNBC's Cosmic Log" actually points to a story about the coverage of the upcoming solar eclipse from Panama...certainly newsworthy in its own right, but somewhat offtopic here..
In the interest of promoting more discussion, a lot of good info regarding the NASA bandwidth sponsorship can be found here.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Won't people stop with this? A 2% failure rate on a rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt is a very impressive rate for orbital rockets - not just for the US, but worldwide. We may not like this fact, but that's the reality of space travel: it's *dangerous*. You get into a craft for which most of its mass is some of the most eager-to-react chemicals we can produce, made of thin, flimsy materials (because it has to stay incredibly light), has millions of components (the complexity of a real, high performance rocket engine that can take you to orbit makes million dollar jet engines look like child's toys), these materials undergo high vibrational loads and G forces, the engine materials are often exposed to temperatures hotter than the boiling point of iron in extremely corrosive environments, the turbopumps have to spin at tens of thousands of rpms. You're often handing cryogenic materials that can make things that are normally sturdy snap like twigs; cryogenic hydrogen is especially bad, as it also embrittles metals. When you get to orbit, you're constantly bombarded with particles moving at tens of thousands of miles an hour, along with radiation and severe temperature extremes that are eager to freeze up your hydraulics, cause expansion problems, and basically mess up anything that they can. On reentry, you're exposed to ridiculous amounts of heat as you try and burn off all of that energy that you spent accelerating using your proportionally tiny orbital craft.
Honestly, it's amazing that these craft ever survive.
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
Unknown to many, If you are an internet2 (most universities) connected college or university then you probabaly have access to the multicast feed of NASA TV being broadcast by the University of Oregon. WHY NASA does not provide this themselves since NASA is connected to Internet2 is beyond me. (I even wrote to the web site asking about it...nobody responded).
They could save a TON of bandwidth from multicast enabled users clicking on unicast streaming servers...if only they would POST that it's available!
You can't do live video over BitTorrent, since it does not provide in-order delivery.
It will be a sad day when our corporations get all the money they want and NASA has to publish a sponshorship opportunity to run a website.
Corporations don't 'get' money (in the way that NASA does), they have to do something in exchange for it (like, sell something) or talk investors into delivering it. NASA, on the other hand, works on tax dollars, which means that everybody in the country (at least, the part of the country that pays taxes, anyway) funds their programs. I think they should have a much bigger budget, but a lot of people don't.
Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense to avoid a potentially more bruising budget fight in front of the administration and congress when some donors (who will very carefully think about who the audience is for these events, and will only provide resources if it makes sense for their business model) are willing to take up some of the slack. Episodic events (like shuttle launches) are ideal for this sort of sponsorship because the need for that overhead is fleeting, and can be tied to a date on a calendar. That works well for people in the PR/marketing side of things, and allows NASA to focus more on actually safely hurling people and equipment into space and have to worry less about which project to extend or kill.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Reluctantly replying to my own message, before anybody else points out the faux-pas I should apologise for the misleading statistics - the web page I linked was for a "large city" not the 'net in general. Now, I'm having trouble finding stats pages for the 'net in general - been a few years since I needed to look them up (or was interested)! Sorry!
Do you understand that NASA subdomain servers are often just single boxes with Apache running on them? It's not like everyone's running a server farm, and if one day their pictures suddenly become popular, well... they don't have the funding to do much more than watch the boxes start smoking. It's also not as if they're each connected to the web on their own gigabit pipe.
If www.nasa.gov went down, I'd be concerned, but let's be reasonable...
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Unless I am misunderstanding you it is not too difficult to dig up that data you just have to know what you are searching for.
1 2.xls
Here's the spreadsheet I always use when citing government budget figures.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy06/sheets/25_
And here's a bunch of other stuff...
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/
I find these summary tables are the best place to start. For further breakdowns, you can hit up the detailed budget info here.
A GBU-12 is $19K .. which would be around two DS-3 circuits for a month.
OK, I'll see your $10k and raise you another $10k, just to cover inflation for this year. Doesn't matter unless we're off by a couple of decimal points. That still doesn't even come close to supporting the concurrent traffic that NASA would like to be able to support during a launch. Sure, over a given month that would be nice for typical traffic - that much bandwidth would help them out a lot with visiting school kids and whatnot. But in the, say, 10 minutes before, and 60 minutes after a launch (or a landing, etc.), two DS-3's would still just be drinking straws for the half million (!!!) live video feeds they want to serve up.
The post to which I replied - where the poster suggests that NASA's infrastructure needs in this regard could be covered with the cost of one smart bomb - is just slanted, trolling rhetoric, and I didn't want to let it go unanswered.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.