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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."
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
I know you're joking and yes I found it funny. You gave me a chuckle. I just wanted to point out that they only use RDP when the link is being used for voice/video/data communication between the ISS and the ground. The rest of the time they can use it like any other LAN based Internet, meaning they can use their personal laptops without resorting to RDP.
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.