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."

Comments

How do NASA's needs compare to other high bandwidt

[Hulkster]

Be real interesting to see a chart showing bandwidth needs for various high profile sites such as Google, CNN, Slashdot, and (most recently) the Vatican.

Probably the best qualified to help 'em out would be the p0rn sites ... somehow, I doubt NASA will accept those offers in exchange for a banner ad on Nasa.Gov ... ;-)

P.S. I noticed Slashdot is offered a Free One Day Pass (sponsored by ThinkGeek) - new revenue generator for 'em? Ironically, if you click thru on the article after getting your free one day pass, it says "Posting will only be possible in The Mysterious Future!" - a minor, but funny, typo.

One word:

[FiveNines]

bittorrent....

Nice shuttle roll-out pics

[MagPulse]

NASA has some nics pics of the roll-out from Wednesday. This one is my favorite, and thanks to the high resolution it makes great wallpaper.

Half a million viewers? I think not...

[Eyeball97]

Half a million streaming video clients? More than a little ambitious, I'd say.

Even at a modest 64kbps stream this would consume 32Gbps of bandwidth - that's THREE OC192's or, although the figures vary quite widely (Here's one), approximately the entire capacity of the "Internet" as it currently stands.

There are technologies that can handle this using a mere 64kbps in total (e.g. multicast) but they're not widely adopted/available (side note - why??)

You'd think an agency that can put someone on the Moon and vehicles on Mars would have the tech savvy to know off the top of their heads that they're dreaming!

Re:How do NASA's needs compare to other high bandw

[Rei]

I regularly visit NASA.com's Cassini page and Mars rovers page. I'm hardly the only one. They sometimes put interesting features on the front page as well related to various scientific discoveries (things like the discovery of gamma ray bursts from lightning, making earth the most powerful gamma ray source for orbital craft).

Re:Contact info.

[Rei]

Wake me up when they produce anything that addresses the real technical challenges of real spaceflight, instead of building unscalable joyrides.

Re:Ask Yahoo!

[Iphtashu Fitz]

More like they should ask Akamai since Yahoo relies on Akamai for its content delivery.

Re:It's all about priorities

[ScentCone]

The cost of one smart bomb will more than cover the bandwidth needs of nasa for the shuttle coverage. hmmm, says a lot about priorities

Well, let's see now. "Smart Bomb" covers a lot of territory, but take for example the one that we used the most of during the Gulf war. That would be the 500lb GBU-12 Laser-Guided Bomb. It's actually gotten a lot less expensive to produce those, but at the time, they cost about $9,000.

$9,000 isn't even going to but a dent in NASA's desire to run thousands of concurrent streaming video feeds during a shuttle launch. When you decide to make political points (never mind a discussion of what it costs in lives and dollars to not use guided munitions), please at least get within a few orders of magnitude of the facts - you'll at least sound more credible as your actual meaning is dissected.

ESM

[DesiVideoGamer]

Why can't they use ESM ? That should save them bandwidth.

Sponsorship is a mistake

[Mr. Lwanga]

Using fundraising to make up budget shortfalls is a big mistake. All the beancounters and PHBs will see is that NASA made do with less, so they will get the same or less money in the next years budget.

Re:To paraphrase.

[ediron2]

NASA doesn't get the funding that it needs, yes. They get half of what they got, proportionally, back in the days of Apollo, and their budget is completely dwarfed by things like the military, medicare, medicaid, social security, national debt interest, etc.

The hard numbers are interesting:

Nasa : $16 Billion
Military : $420 Billion
Medicare : $300 Billion
Medicaid : $175 Billion
SocialSec: $518 Billion
Interest : $322 Billion
Etc. : ... well, there's $2500 Billion total spending

Even more interesting is the serious PITA it is to find this data. I've got projected 2005, budgeted 2005, some 2004, and some 2006 stuff overlapping up there. Politicians and agencies hide the info a zillion ways, talking in percentages and percent-changes whenever it'll improve their argument.