@motherboard I'm Writing From Space LOL
Posted by Smelloman on Monday, Aug 24, 2009
You know how sometimes the crew of the International Space Station video chats with a school group or TV show, and it’s all boring and looks all web-cam circa 1998? Turns out, that’s pretty tricky to do. Which is why it’s a big deal that NASA just finished setting up the “interplanetary internet’s” first permanent node. Now that I’m actually thinking about it, broadcasting video to Earth from space is a pretty astounding feat. It’s easy to overlook in 2009, after all these years of making movies up there.
Like it’s terrestrial sibling, the interplanetary internet was designed by Vint Cerf, creator of the TCP/IP, you know, the protocol that every single computer in the world uses to talk to each other. If you’ve ever enjoyed an evening at home watching youtube clips of people hurting themselves you owe that experience, at least in part, to Vint Cerf. TCP/IP only works with a constant connection- a luxury unavailable to the Space Station. Instead NASA is developing delay-tolerant networking, or DTN, which transmits bundles of data from node to node, with each node holding on to the data bundle until the next node is ready.
Already the new system has boosted space to Earth data transfer by about four times its previous speed. Unfortunately, NASA’s plotting to use this technology in a devious and ‘glitzy’ scheme to promote the Administration: Tweets From Space. Blech.
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Smelloman
I have no orignal idea in my brain
Moscow, Russian Federation
Member since 2009
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luislavena about 1 year ago
This is amazing news actually. DTN could not only improve communication but also solve lot of radio relay devices that faces exact same issues, all of them inside atmosphere :-) Tweet from space sounds nice, but I doubt see tweets like _I'm eating a sandwich_ will became popular in the station...
CBdelux 11 months ago
I feel like if you're in space you'd have much cooler stuff to talk about. You're in space!
FirstTry 9 months ago
Yeah! Like _I'm eating a sandwich...IN SPACE! ROFL_
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