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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 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
Why? Are they supposed to blow up too?
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.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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.
Didn't we once /. one of their servers?
Only on a subdomain, but it still shouldn't be possible.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
bittorrent....
Nasa is having bandwidth problems... let's post links to them on Slashdot!
Why stream it all to a few, instead of using BitTorrent to send the complete files to everyone that wants them?
perl -e'print$_{$_} for sort%_=`lynx -dump svanstrom.com/t`'
NASA has some nics pics of the roll-out from Wednesday. This one is my favorite, and thanks to the high resolution it makes great wallpaper.
Even at a modest 64kbps stream this would consume 32Gbps of bandwidth - that's THREE OC192's or, although the figures vary quite widely (Here's one), approximately the entire capacity of the "Internet" as it currently stands.
There are technologies that can handle this using a mere 64kbps in total (e.g. multicast) but they're not widely adopted/available (side note - why??)
You'd think an agency that can put someone on the Moon and vehicles on Mars would have the tech savvy to know off the top of their heads that they're dreaming!
Is there a way to use Coral for distributing the feeds?
I regularly visit NASA.com's Cassini page and Mars rovers page. I'm hardly the only one. They sometimes put interesting features on the front page as well related to various scientific discoveries (things like the discovery of gamma ray bursts from lightning, making earth the most powerful gamma ray source for orbital craft).
sed "s/SJW.*$/... 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!
I have a DSL connection. It should handle fine unless we're playing xbox online but I'll keep that to the off hours. Gimme a call.
twitter.com/gravitronic
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"
If they want more money, why don't they just put a PayPal link up?
... and then they built the supercollider.
More like they should ask Akamai since Yahoo relies on Akamai for its content delivery.
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.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why can't they use ESM ? That should save them bandwidth.
I like there vision statement The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Vision is: To improve life here, To extend life to there, To find life beyond. It is #2 that troubles me.
I make my face look like this and concerned words come out.
Sell the super-secret Air Force shuttle on ebay.
That'll buy some bandwidth.
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.
If NASA needs private sponsorships and advertising to get along, why not let true private enterprise (instead of quasi-private) take over the aspects of spaceflight which it's not prepared to support? I'd much rather see Pizza Hut paying -- voluntarily, and with clearcut goals of their own! -- for spaceflight than me, my landlord, and my neighbors, who are not given any specific choice about it.
;))
(Please don't tell me that "we as a society decided to give money to NASA to do it" unless you believe that every government decision represents societal concensus. Consider this: if U.S. tax return forms had a checkbox for NASA, reading something like "Yes, I'd like to direct a dollar of this tax money or contribute an additional [dollar amount, please fill in] ______, enclosed, to NASA," then *that* would be voluntary -- and a good idea, to boot, sez me. It would sure knock down the whole argument I made in the first graf here
Militarily, there's reason for NASA: among other things, they help launch satellites. Defense is a natural imperative, so I'll assert, not just concede, that part. To a lesser extent, though I think it's mostly a budget- and political carrot rather than near-term reality (Hey, what happened to the Bush plan to put folks again on the moon?), NASA research on practical matters of human life in space is somewhat justifiable.
What about abstract knowledge part of NASA? While I realize this makes me an anti-science troglodyte who hates any advance in human knowledge, I don't think that tax dollars should be paying for edge-of-galaxy explorer probes, or satellite telescopes looking outward at the various nebulae -- fascinating and good as those things are! (Golf carts on Mars is easier to swallow, wrt the Life in Space loophole, and so are satellite views of Earth, which show, among other things, how humans affect the planet.)
Note: I'm not saying no one should be interested in or study abstract, non-practical, just-for-insatiable-curiosity things about space -- far from it. I'm only raising the issue of how they're paid for and justified. The government doesn't spend our money very well, and frequently act with it in ways that decrease the national well-being; my biggest gripe about the way NASA money is spent is that it amounts to a tax subsidy, year after year, for a handful of entrenched companies that are technically private but mostly exist because of their (to mix a metaphor) pole position at the public teat.
Ahem.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
IIRC challenger was not supposed to launch according to its engineers. It was management that overrode the engineering staff about O-ring stability at too low temperatures. So lay off the engineering.
As to destroying stuff, I'd like to see you (even with a bigger budget than NASA) design from scratch a space program as advanced and have fewer failures. Bleeding edge science nearly requires some ammount of failures. The earlier the failure is found the cheaper (in all costs $$ / Time / Human) it is to fix. While it is sad that we've lost people (and equipment), it would be sadder if we lost Kevlar, PyroCeram, and other space program derivitives because we were afraid to do the research. If you were interested PyroCeram plates are awesome! Just don't put them in a microwave oven.
Oh, and on another note: I was one of those kids (6th grade) rooting for the first teacher in space. I (and my class, teachers, and parents) saw it blow up. . . live. My teacher started crying, as did most of us. It was a tough day, but as a result my class did a lot of research and learned a great deal. Something else that would have likely not happened if this desaster did not befall.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
The simplest, easiest, quickest, cheapest answer is for NASA to persuade ISPs to enable multicasting. Then bandwidth ceases to be an issue and nobody has to run any additional servers on anything.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
in fact, everyone who pays taxes is a sponsor ;-)