Is This A Good Idea? Interplanetary Internet?

August 03, 2009

I thought this might at least be the week that I’d have to do that blog that I’ve been putting off on bacon-powered vehicles, but fortunately, I came across this recent Discovery News article, entitled “NASA Tests Internet in Space.” Here’s the gist:

After more than a decade of development, NASA is in a rush to have a communications network ready by 2011 that can efficiently carry data between Earth and the multiple probes, rovers, orbiters and spacecraft exploring the solar system—effectively binding them together to form an interplanetary Internet.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist—in this case, that cliché is appropriate—to understand the enormous benefits of being able to connect to the Internet beyond the confines of this world. Spacecraft, orbiting satellites and space stations, and unmanned rovers on other planets would be able to communicate directly with anyone on Earth and each other. When we eventually establish manned bases on the moon and Mars, space colonists will be able to Google needed information, send emails, videos and Tweets back home, run cloud computing applications on servers back on Earth, and tap into the power of supercomputer networks such as TeraGrid The enormous physical distances in space will be effectively minimized, because a few mouse clicks will connect us to whatever is happening on the Final Frontier.

Sounds pretty neat, huh? So neat, in fact, that I’m struggling to come up with potential downsides. But here are a few. The interplanetary Internet presumably would become a target for hackers, virus-writing teenagers, Eastern European slavebot masters and all the other troublemakers who screw up the Internet on Earth; the first time that the likes of the Conficker worm nfests a billion-dollar robot rover on Mars, NASA may rue the day that it wired the solar system. Additionally, I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to give astronauts access to the Web, i.e., the greatest time-waster ever invented. The next thing you know, they’ll be spending half of their missions updating their Facebook pages, bidding in eBay auctions and perusing YouTube for funny cat videos (like this one,) and scientific productivity will go completely to hell. And as this article by Louisiana State University law school professor Lee Ann W. Lockridge notes, it’s unclear at best whether copyright laws apply in space. That means it’s only a matter of time before someone launches an orbital-based version of Pirate Bay and the Motion Picture Association of America won’t be able to do a thing about it. And finally, if there are intelligent life forms out there, it’s going to be awful tempting for them to start freeloading on astronauts’ Wi-Fi networks and hogging all the bandwidth.

The idea of having Internet access in outer space is almost as old as the Web itself. Internet pioneer Vinton G. Cerf seems to have been the one who first hatched the notion—albeit facetiously, in a 1994 Internet Engineering Task Force RFC (request for comment) document that he posted online as an April Fool’s Day joke. Cast as a series of emails to and from scientists based on Mars in the year 2023, Cerf envisioned them communicating with the help of a ring of telecommunications satellites orbiting Mars, and complaining about data transfer rates of "only a few terabits per second.” (That would be about a million times faster than the current U.S. average Internet speed of 3.9 Mbps.)

But Cerf and other researchers eventually began working on developing an actual outer-space hookup as well, forming a group called the Interplanetary Internet Project. In 2005, according to this Wired article, they proposed creating something called a delay-tolerant networking architecture, which would cope with the inevitable disruptions that would occur during transmissions between moving bodies across the great distances of space, by keeping large quantities of data in a single unit during transmission. (That approach is a contrast to the packet-switching technology used by the terrestrial Internet, in which information is chopped into smaller bits, transmitted to its end destination, and then reassembled.)

In the last year or so, the interplanetary Internet has started to become a reality. NASA successfully tested a DTN protocol in space in October 2008 by transmitting 300 images from a comet-studying probe 1.5 million miles from Earth. A few weeks ago, NASA established the first permanent Internet node in space, aboard the International Space Station NASA is envisioning that DTN will be ready for use on spacecraft by 2011.

So what do you think? Is the interplanetary Internet a good idea? Or should we keep the heavens unconnected? Express your opinion below.

BTW, I know some of you think last week’s post about flesh-eating robot zombies, coupled with an earlier post on killer robots, suggests that I’m developing a dangerous case of techno-paranoia. But here’s an article from the Swedish newspaper The Local about an actual robot-on-human attack that you should read, before you turn your back on that seemingly friendly little Roomba.

Comments

[Walter Meyer]

Yes, it's a good idea. I was excited when my local park started offering free wi-fi. I can't wait until I can still update my Facebook status on the way to Mars.

[Astroboy]

I agree with Walter. I want to play Halo on the moon!!!!

[Lyn]

Like the space program, I'm sure this will generate other businesses and products. So I say, why not go for it, who knows what may come out of it besides twittering astronauts.

[GW]

Sounds like bad news for the Martian News & Chronicle. I give it a year before all the advertising dries up.

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

hahaha....that's brilliant, GW.

[Canadian]

It's hard to imagine working without being able to use Google or email these days, so I think it's essential for astronauts to have access.

[Daniel Jones]

So you're giving Internet to space rocks? although I hope the us doesn't fund this(In debt, and It sounds costly) they probably will. and why would you need Google Canadian? check the weather? stay up to date with:
blogs.discovery.com/good_idea?
I gust think It's not a good time, that's all.
but I'm 13, what do I know?

[Alex]

The latency would be slow at best. Even the fastest internet can't go faster than light and it takes 8 seconds for light to get from the moon to earth. 186 seconds for Mars. Can you imagine having to wait 6 minutes just to open Google? Then 6 minutes again to search something? Then 6 more to open the site you wanted to find?? I suppose it's better than nothing though...

[Charlie Krause]

I can imagine that...I'm old enough to remember dialup with a 14.4 modem.

[andrew]

I thought it was 1.3 sec for light to go from earth to the moon and 1.3 sec to come back.

[Cynic]

Just give the Astronauts laptops with Vista as the operating system. They'll already be so slow that they won't even notice the lag time.

[Futurist]

they've got to find a faster-than-light way to transmit data.

[azend]

Wouldn't the problem with this idea be not sending the signal out but getting the much less powerful wifi radios to send it back. A more modular system with base stations on each planet is a much better idea.