Slashdot Mirror
ISS Launches First Permanent Node of "Interplanetary Internet"
schliz writes "Researchers developing the 'Interplanetary Internet' have launched its first permanent node in space via a payload aboard the International Space Station. The network is based on a new communications protocol called Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). It will be tested heavily this month, and could give astronauts direct Internet access within a year. The Interplanetary Internet is the brainchild of Vint Cerf ('father of the Internet'), among others. Last year, NASA tested the technology on the Deep Impact spacecraft." Update: 07/13 20:01 GMT by KD : If by "permanent" we mean seven years.
Now that's a movie worth full admission and oversized popped corn.
"It will be tested heavily this month" , so, they are going to post the URL on slashdot ?
i am in ur space station, trollin' ur boards!
Uh... sorry. But NASA's plans for the ISS, or anything like it at this time, are hardly "permanent".
If you want them to be, get off your butts and tell that to the Whitehouse and your Congresscritters. Because they obviously don't know.
Before we'll have our first bittorrent tracker on mars.
Hmmmmm. Will we get an earthly version of DTN that ensures I can successfully download large files over TOR? Now, *that* would be useful.
It'll be permanent until the ISS is de-orbited in 2016, eh?
The consequences might be a little rough.
. I'm already on it. Look, here's the latest news from Uranus: Bruno & Senile Mice. .
blog me no blogs
So, how's going to set the record for sending the first pornography packet into outer space?
I would be interested in reading some specifications about what traffic capacity this node has.
pr0n from space! The *new* frontier!
for various values of permanent.
... to FTP to Mars.
Do not read this
It's time to patch my little pretties.
They named the spacecraft "Deep Impact" ...Who's the rocket scientist who came up with that one?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Seriously, there will be a lot of discussion. Look at all the legislation involved. Since it is on ISS which law will apply for hosted data?
If experience on Slashdot has taught me anything, having the Internet on ISS is a bad idea. The astronauts will spend half the time surfing the Internet instead of running 'scientific experiments'.
.. or downloading the latest Michael Jackson DVDs for a hands on tutorial of the 'Moonwalk'.
Means the astronauts can now access porn?
Has anyone taken into account the sheer volume of pron that takes up the vast majority of the internet and what kind of impression that will leave on impressionable alien children as they zoom by our wee rock? Not to mention all of the middle aged aliens seeing our internet and thinking that if were they to land that it would be one giant non stop orgy filled with only the prettiest people,mountains of blow,and lots and lots of latex.
Not to be used for Counterstrike.
[Intentionally left blank]
Sorry, posting this from ISS.
"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power." -- James Madison
Ok, dorky question, but what protocols is it using? I mean, how does it make up for the sometimes massive EMD that will be in the way occasionally? A thunderstorm? TCP doesn't seem like it would be enough to handle the interference. Is it a microwave transmission? Are they using blinky lights? Are they using ethernet or some WAN technology? Do they use IPv6?
Sorry, I don't see how this technology and "using the Internet" are at all related.
It's a store-and-forward technology designed to allow interruptions of seconds, days, weeks, months, etc. in communication. How does that relate to the modern Internet or being able to "post on Twitter"? What you're saying is that I can request a webpage and (via suitable protocol-translation at some gateway presumably back on Earth) eventually my request will be sent - TCP handshaking is out of the window, timeouts will defeat login attempts, etc. What this actually *might* be is a very, very delay-tolerant email setup... we have one of those... it's called "retry and exponential backoff". This assumes *so* much it's unbelievable and basically tries to plant real-time TCP web traffic in the same category as "send this message to Earth, I don't care when it arrives".
Are the public seriously that stupid that even this mildly technical article has to be related to Twitter in order for people to understand it (erroneously)?
... will allow Goatse to spread even further...
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
I'm pretty sure that MDU Communications has volunteered our condo building to test DTN for the last year or so. I guess they figure since they have an exclusive contract with our building and we don't have any other choice of ISP (besides dial-up and capped 3G cellular), we'd be perfect. I can report that Slashdot is working this morning, although Google is not. Maybe once the system is deployed to ISS, they'll stop injecting delays and disruptions!
i wonder how long it takes to get a ping reply from outer space.
Skynet?
Astronauts finally don't have to use that shaky GPRS on their iPhones. I've heard the reception is really bad over there.
... I am. I tagged the story !father so you know to correct it. thxbai
I liked the idea, and went on to read more about the protocol.
I can definitely see some uses for this on earth.
One example would be on cruising sailboats that only have occasional access to inexpensive wifi hotspots, and the rest of the time have to use slow SSB links. Another
example might be for use in automotive networking, where a car sometimes has access to a real network, sometimes a cellular, and sometimes just some low-fi sattelite.
But really, this all sounds eerily familiar. Could if be FidoNet and UUCP in space?
I still want to see it implemented in the next Linux kernel though.
pornz... in... space...
Perhaps with this, the astronauts will finally be able to download some codecs so they can watch DVDs on the space station. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/27/1656214
I thought the "big deal" with NASA's new protocol was that it could handle the overly-long round trip times (stupid speed of light and vast interplanetary distances!) that would make TCP unusable. I suppose that's what the store-and-forward process is suppose to get around (among other things), but the article doesn't make that particularly clear.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
...no one can hear you get fragged.
(To you /.er's that love to correct people: I know there will be latency issues....shut up.)
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Thank God they didn't pull a Branson on themselves and call it "InterGalactic Internet" or some such nonsense.
Obviously this isn't THAT permanent since it's being de-orbited in 2016.
In space, no-one can hear you get Rickrolled...
Interplanetary is defined as, "existing or occurring between planets" or "being or occurring between the planets or between a planet and the sun."
How is is a setup between a space station and a planet interplanetary?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Will colonists on Jupiter's moons (except for Europa of course) be able to play WoW? That 17 minute latency would be a real game killer.
This space for rent...
If Vint Cerf is the 'father of the Internet', I wonder who the mother is ...
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
$ wget http://blah.com.mars/
Error: Connection timed out.
20 minutes later...
TCP packet from blah.com.mars just arrived.
Worlds of Warcraft.
Surely this isn't much better / worse than satellite tv?
From a ground station to a few geo-sync satellites then to ... a wifi AP? if tv can go from ground to sky to ground - and phone calls can do the same without great latency, then pushing data to and from a geo sync satellite and then to / from a space station isnt very difficult??
1) Give astronaut CD of latest pop music craze.
2) Have astronaut rip CD to MP3.
3) Create and host torrent of album from ISS.
4) Make RIAA go to orbit to subpoena astronaut.
5) ???
6) Profit!
This might actually help us get a real commercial space program going.
All your space stations are belong to us.
-Z
-Z
Can I get an email account on their server? Maybe imscarr@iss.et ?
Like the beaver, it's just Dam one thing after another
UUCP - the store and forward network of the 20th century. Will be interesting to see if they come up with alternative naming, and whether Harri's Lament still holds- "All the good ones are taken!"
While this specific hardware is new -- It has been my impression that IP has already been used on the deep space network (DSN) for years already.
...like FTP-by-email, but for any Internet protocol, not just FTP.
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)
It sits between the Ethernet and TCP/UDP layers. Where the hell do you think it's going to sit? On top of the monitor? The only way you could add DTN except in the kernel is via netfilter (which would make this not only Linux-specific but also firewall technology specific, as netfilter is being replaced).
Adding DTN in userspace via netfilter would (a) add some very stupid and unnecessary context switches, and (b) totally subvert the purpose for which netfilter is designed, not for technical reasons but political ones.
But there's nowhere else you can put it, if you want to run DTN in userspace. Which means you either have a totally stupid, farcical solution OR a kernel implementation.
Take your pick.
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)
Actually, J.C.R. Licklider coined the term "Intergalactic Computer Network" in a series of memos 1962, culminating in a paper outlining the ideas for Internet in a research paper co-written with Robert Taylor.
Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts created the blueprint of the architecture for the Internet, and then solicited proposals for its implementation. One of the proposals came from packet switching pioneer Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, who had a graduate student name Vint Cerf. The first nodes of the ArpaNet (which became known as the Internet) communicated with each other in 1969 (the year before Cerf got his master's degree), wherein a message was sent from the node at Doug Engelbart's lab to the node at Kleirock's. In 1970, Bolt, Beranek and Newman (a.k.a BBN) in Massachusetts was the first East Coast node; working at BBN was Bob Kahn, who later collaborated with Cerf to create TCP/IP.
This article excerpt from Business Week explains more:
I'm so old I remember being taught algorithms for ancient reel-to-reel computers (think background of stuff in the '60s TV show Lost in Space) for merging, sorting, and so on, giant databases based when having access to 1, 2, or 3 reels and a severely limited amount of RAM. Efficient in that context can be way different from the modern World of Plenty programming.
Six hundred years ago, I once made a joke somewhere about how bad the lag would be playing a game of Quake intercontinentally using courierred tape reels.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
This gives the astronauts some more intellectual material to spend their time on in the otherwise potentially-boring interplanetary missions. Of course, the term 'intellectual' may be a stretch. Could also be a reason to spruce up a locally-stored-thread-type service, to give the astronauts something that they could read without a 16-minute wait. Their replies would still have a long wait, but who cares, it's not like they are clicking on a hyperlink.
... but the cable company said they would be there between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm!