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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.
I find these summary tables are the best place to start. For further breakdowns, you can hit up the detailed budget info here.