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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.
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(){}'
Nasa is having bandwidth problems... let's post links to them on Slashdot!
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!
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 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
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
I find these summary tables are the best place to start. For further breakdowns, you can hit up the detailed budget info here.