Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NASA Looking for Bandwidth Sponsorship

Posted by Zonk on from the packets-in-spaaaaace dept.

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."

7 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. How do NASA's needs compare to other high bandwidt by Hulkster · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  2. One word: by FiveNines · · Score: 3, Interesting

    bittorrent....

  3. Nice shuttle roll-out pics by MagPulse · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Half a million viewers? I think not... by Eyeball97 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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!

  5. Re:Contact info. by Rei · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

    --
    sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
  6. ESM by DesiVideoGamer · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  7. Re:To paraphrase. by ediron2 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.