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Space Station Astronauts Gain Internet Access
cyclone96 writes "Internet access on the International Space Station went live this morning. The crew now has full browsing capability via a special LAN and the Ku-band data link on the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite network, as described in the NASA press release. Flight Engineer T. J. Creamer used the access to post the first tweet from orbit about 7 hours ago. Previous astronaut tweets had been posted by a third party on the ground via email."
Great, they RDP to a ground computer and go about their way. 3 problems I can forsee: 1. Somewhat laggy screen redraw 2. Possible RDPviewer remote code exploits? Then there'll be the first goatxe in space. 3. Line of sight problems, how is the handoff handled once the station goes over the horizon? Cool, though, glad to hear they've got the capability... Lets get them 100meg access, the RIAA and MPAA cant get them in SPACE!
Still no aliens. Keeping vigilant.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
No, but EO (earth orbit) and LO (low orbit) are both available.
http://www.iso.org/iso/iso-3166-1_decoding_table
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
They don't say how they did this feat, but it doesn't have to have sucky lag. Remember, ISS is only a couple hundred miles from earth, which is likely closer than you are to pretty much any server you access. The furthest away they'd be from any server is halfway around the world, which still can have 150-200 ms ping times theoretically.
But if they do use a geosync sat for routing to earth, then it will have a slow ping like the people in the boonies with sat internet. At least they don't have to worry about losing signal when it rains.
The space station is at most 460km above the Earth. Not counting bouncing around support satellites, the lag is only going to be a millisecond or two. People have this misconception that the ISS is far from the Earth, while in reality it's not that high up.
Even if they have to bounce through a satellite in GEO (which is some 100 times farther away than the ISS and the farthest you're going to get for comms), that's, say, 300ms Earth-GEO-ISS, so the total ping time would be 600ms. No good for Counter-Strike, but still quite tolerable.
RTFA: "During periods when the station is actively communicating with the ground using high-speed Ku-band communications, the crew will have remote access to the Internet via a ground computer. The crew will view the desktop of the ground computer using an onboard laptop and interact remotely with their keyboard touchpad."
It's difficult, but not impossible, to spread malware via RDP or VNC or X or whatever.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
They have remote control of a PC at mission control. Other than screen data / mouse & keyboard input, no communication is done directly with ISS.
There are many moons. Earth's would be called .luna
Life is not for the lazy.