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Space The Internet

US Air Force Building Space Router 353

Posted by CmdrTaco from the pings-in-spaaaace dept.
Saint Aardvark writes "From the ISTS daily news comes a story on the US Air Force seeking to build a space router. From TFA: "Northrop Grumman and Caspian Networks are collaborating to develop an Internet Protocol router that can withstand the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit. The space-hardened IP router will be part of the Air Force's Transformational Satellite Communications System, which will provide IP-based communications to warfighters." I wonder what the ping times would be like..."
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US Air Force Building Space Router More

US Air Force Building Space Router

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  • Ping Times (Score:5, Funny)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @12:56PM (#11397475) Homepage Journal
    "I wonder what the ping times would be like..."

    They could tell you, but then they'd have to kill you.

    News to Look Forward To:

    Air Force Get Signal - 'CATS: AYBABTU' Spend $$$,$$$,$$$'s researching origin

    TSAT 0wn3d

    Alan Ralsky sentenced to Abu Ghraib for routing spam through TSAT

    TSAT loses orbit, crushes Tom Cruise on eve of War Of The Worlds opening

    Mischevious Glac-Elves use TSAT to spread Irata Worm

    Air Force officer notices TSAT looks canoe-shaped before realizing contract made with wrong Grumman

    Warfighters welcome their new Space Routing Overlord

    • Looking at the article they don't actually say that it is in GeoSync orbit. So if there is a constellation of them in LEO (or just above LEO), then ping times will not be too bad, but given that:

      1. more than one bird would be in view (to ensure coverage)
      2. average vis time for a single sat will be on the order of minutes
      means that the ground station's routing tables are going to change. Since it is not public access, I wonder if they will run opsf :-) ?

    • Re:Ping Times (Score:3, Informative)

      by capnal ( 795722 )

      I work for a corporation that uses a satellite for data communications.

      As of five minutes ago, I did a ping test from my computer on our WAN, through the AMERICOM-4 satellite [geamericom.com], to a location connected to a VSAT dish.

      PING RESULTS:

      Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
      Minimum = 1412ms
      Maximum = 2013ms
      Average = 1682ms

      Looking further into it using a tracert, I have the following results (IPs/Hosts removed):

      (less than signs should be infront of each 10 ms entry)
      1 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms

  • first post via space router (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @12:57PM (#11397485)
    first po
    NO CARRIER

  • Woohoo... (Score:5, Funny)

    by It doesn't come easy ( 695416 ) * on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @12:57PM (#11397486) Journal
    Gonna need a hell of a long patch cable...
    • Cool- Another use for the Carbon Nanotubes they plan to use on the Space Elevator. :) But certainly not something you can buy for $10 at your local computer store.

  • Ping times. (Score:5, Informative)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @12:57PM (#11397488) Homepage Journal

    I wonder what the ping times would be like...

    (nb: I worked on some satellite internet stuff a few years ago.) If this unit is in geosynchronous orbit (so a fixed dish can always hit it), it's sitting almost 36,000 Km over the equator. Assuming your dish is at the equator a round trip is ~72,000 Km / 300,000 Km/sec (the speed of light) means the signal travels about a quarter second earth->earth not including any processing time at the satellite midway point or either end.

    • Re:Ping times. (Score:3, Funny)

      by Kenja ( 541830 )
      You win again speed of light. But I'll beat you some day!

    • Re:Ping times. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Brett Buck ( 811747 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:04PM (#11397594)
      It's surprising how long that ~1/2 a second can be. I've had conversations over a geo comsat, and it's pretty awkward - just long enough to screw up the flow, but not so long that you have to consciously compensate for it.
    • Air force general: (watching his tactical monitoring system skip and slop.) Damn Lag!
      • Yea Fragging bad guys with lag always sucks. Of course with luck the AI controlling the enemy troops will finally be improved.

        I always hated an AI that was to easy to crush.
    • Statistically, there has to be life on other planets somewhere. There is also probability that this life evolved to the point of having computers. There is a slim chance (ok maybe not a snowballs chance in hell) that they created IP networks like us. But, I promise you, if there is even a single iota of a chance that they did. My godd--ned corporate network will find a way to incorporate some Altairian ISPs slowest router as an entry in my OSPF tables. Resulting in 7 year latency. Furthermore, my users and

  • How to harden a router. (Score:5, Funny)

    by BeProf ( 597697 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @12:58PM (#11397503)
    Wrap it in tinfoil?

    • Re:How to harden a router. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 3rd_Floo ( 443611 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:09PM (#11397667) Homepage
      I know this was a joke, but just to give some extra insight to some rad hardening perticulars... Tinfoil would not be enough, creating efficient Rad hardened electronics is an interesting problem. Not only do you have to deal with simple EM types of interference, but the possibility of radiation flipping the bit stored in a register. Typically parallel processors that do redundant checks on data, multipath techniques and other sharing and swarm-consensus types of architectures would be employed. This is the preferred method because strapping a big honking metal plate is MUCH more costly, just to negate rad effects. Although they would still have to shield it against small-debris impacts.

  • About Freaking Time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Emugamer ( 143719 ) * on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @12:59PM (#11397521) Homepage Journal
    Okay this wasn't exactly the use that I had thought of an IP based communications grid and I for sure am not the most knowlegeable on the subject of radio communication arrays used by NASA et al but isn't it time that we have a formalized "cell" network in space to best aquire signals from microsats and such? reduce the cost of individual launchs by already having everything up there that you need to communicate with and then just move forwards with less communication equipment and more mission core equipment?

    can someone who knows more about this tell me why this hasn't been done?!?

    • Re:About Freaking Time (Score:4, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:15PM (#11397755) Homepage
      We already have TDRS [nasa.gov] (tracking data relay system). It is a system that can acquire data from satellites in low-Earth orbit with near-global coverage. A set of specialized satellites in geosynchronous orbit are used to track, command, and acquire data.
      • TDRS (there are multiple TDRS's actually) has some drawbacks: It's NOT real-time, it is time sliced to handle only certain sattelites at one time (limit is five). The first generation TDRS was originally intended to support Manned Missions like STS, and a few sattelites but now they have lots of missions going thru it. It's very utilized. Many Sattelites store data in on-board data recorders, compress it and play it back when it is their turn on TDRS. Some of the TDRS's were upgraded in recent years, and N

    • The TDRS satellites have served this function for the last 20 years for NASA. Traditional communications satellites also transmit IP routinely. Technically, they are not wireless routers, they are transponders. But one of their uses is to transmit IP streams.

      The Iridium and Globalstar constellations also operate as cell networks in space.

  • ... but it sounds like they are putting a wood shop in orbit. I guess the need pretty bevels or something.

  • A Space Router! Wowzers! (Score:5, Funny)

    by syntap ( 242090 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @12:59PM (#11397525)
    They figured out how to route space! Does this route time too?

    My network closet router only routes closets.

  • ET phone home (Score:4, Funny)

    by It doesn't come easy ( 695416 ) * on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:00PM (#11397535) Journal
    So, how are they going to keep ET from patching in to the internet for free? Did they think of that? Eh?
  • The developers intend for the router to be upgradeable from the ground. As new iterations of the Internet Protocol are released and adopted, the router can be kept current.
    So are they expecting IPv8 to be developed before IPv6 is even deployed?
  • ...Sucks.

    I have direcway, it was either that or dial-up because I live in the boonies of the tehachapi mountains in California. The lags are terrible, on the order to 2 seconds or more. Plus, when it snows, I have to clear the dish of snow to get online. Download rates are OK, but uploads are on the order of a 56k modem.
    • Umm...DirecWay is a consumer project with consumer-level reliability. While I prefer not to work with satellites, some carriers (VSAT, for one), have business-class operations that allow bidirectional high-speed bandwidth with latencies of about 600ms. That's high, yes, but not 2 seconds. And given that the Air Force may be putting more than $120/month into this deal, I'm guessing their performance (not latency, necessarily) could be higher.
      • I don't care what the Air Force's budget is. Unless they're going to use some subspace communications technology acquired through the Stargate program, the radio signals to and from that satellite are limited to light-speed. As another poster noted, a geosynchronous satellite is about 36000 km over the earth's surface, and even at light-speed, that's a noticeable time lag just for signal propagation.
    • You can actually get better upload rates by turning off the 56k protocol, although sometimes it is tricky to get the modem to do this. Basically 56k splits the send and recieve bandwith unevenly. in downs favor. Obviously thats quite useless on satelite.

  • What's so special about routers? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hazee ( 728152 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:01PM (#11397559)
    Every satelite up there has to withstand "the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit". If the communications, or video or whatever got scrambled, then they wouldn't be a whole lot of use.

    So what's so special about a router?

    • Budget Cutbacks (Score:3, Funny)

      by lxt ( 724570 )
      Am I the only one who has this image of a bog standard Belkin router encased in a biscuit tin?
    • other than the fact that nobody's flown one yet, nothing

    • Re:What's so special about routers? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheFlyingGoat ( 161967 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:14PM (#11397744) Homepage Journal
      If you set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around Mars, you wouldn't need line of sight to get the data from a rover back to Earth. You could do this with just a repeater, though.

      It gets interesting as we spread out more and more. You can set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around each planet, and data has a much more likely chance of getting back to Earth. You can relay pictures of the stars from Mars to Earth when it's on the other side of the sun.

      You can also send satellites out past Pluto, and if you have a router in orbit around Pluto, there's a good chance for it to relay the signal back to Saturn, Neptune, or Uranus. Then those can relay it back closer and so on. It's much better than the laser aligned communications we use now, where the satellite needs a direct line back to Earth.
      • Um, Nasa beat you to the idea on both counts. In fact they have an entire system called the Deep Space Network that uses an adapted form of TCP/IP to relay information around the solar system. (Adapted because TCP/IP normally cacks when delays exceed 2 minutes. Travel time for signals around the solar system can be hours or days.)
    • Exactly! Communications satellites have on-board computers and thousands of transponders. Preparing electronics for the rigors of space is now a well-understood practice. There is no reason that a router should be any different from any of the other equipment, should there?

      I suppose it is interesting that you could have packets routed between war planes without needing ground-based network services. Not sure why it's necessary, but interesting.

  • In space, (Score:5, Funny)

    by Vengeance ( 46019 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:02PM (#11397563)
    In space, noone can hear you ping.

  • universal IP network (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alphakappa ( 687189 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:02PM (#11397566) Homepage
    Maybe this is a sign of things to come. As we send spacecrafts to Mars and other planets (and someday planets beyond our solar system), the InterPlanetary Internet [ipnsig.org] will need such routers. A router satellite followed by routers in space and on other planets would create a nice little backbone to base our communications on. There would be one hell of a delay, but we could send our spacecrafts farther and farther away without losing the ability to communicate.
  • I sort of got the sense form the article that the "Flow-Based" IP might be some form of pseudo-IP protocol. This might help the ping time of stream based data.

  • look out Hubble! (Score:5, Funny)

    by dubdays ( 410710 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:05PM (#11397605)
    Maybe when the Hubble gets retired they can use it for one hell of a cantenna...

  • Ping Time (Score:3, Informative)

    by TheFlyingGoat ( 161967 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:05PM (#11397609) Homepage Journal
    It would be around 270ms [telesat.ca] for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon. :)

    • It would be around 270ms for a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. It would be a bit more for a router on the moon. :)

      That's a one-way trip. Meaning that traffic only goes to the satellite and back to earth once. That's great if you've got some sort of instrumented satellite up there and you're trying to query it for data, or if you're broadcasting (one way). But because this thing's a router, that implies that traffic will be two-way.

      This means you're going to have that minimum 270ms lag on the outb

  • "Risk Reduction Phase" is acquisitions speak for, 'we're getting ideas and picking which concepts meet our needs the best'. I recognize the network as being used for voice or remote satellite operations. So they must be seeing the need down the road to use IP for communicating with satellites or users. I don't think you'd use it with the moon (probably a joke but if you were serious...) because the geo sync will always have a common point over the earth (hence the name) but be moving relative to the moon

  • The secret's out... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ptomblin ( 1378 ) <ptomblin@xcski.com> on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:06PM (#11397620) Homepage Journal
    UFOs are war flyers looking to see if earth has an open node yet.

  • NASA is already doing this with CISCO (Score:5, Interesting)

    by alphakappa ( 687189 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:08PM (#11397643) Homepage
    From an April 2004 news report [space.com]. There is an interesting quote there:
    "..isco does not expect to develop a business selling space hardware, and estimated that the market for satellite-based Internet routers may be only 15 or 20 units over the next decade. Instead, Cisco's plans are focused on the ground-systems business that could be created if satellites are able to communicate using Internet protocols. With Internet-based communications, laptop computers and personal digital assistants could become de facto satellite ground stations."

  • W.. h.. y... w.. o.. u.. l.. d... y.. o.. u (Score:4, Funny)

    by JohnnyGTO ( 102952 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:09PM (#11397663) Homepage
    w.. o.. r.. r.. y.... a.. b..o..u..t....p..i.. n.. g....t.. i.. m.. e.. s....?

  • What is the medium called (Score:4, Funny)

    by suso ( 153703 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:09PM (#11397665) Journal
    is it going to use aethernet?

  • OT: Warfighter (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Dr. Cody ( 554864 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:13PM (#11397726)
    Can somebody explain why I have never seen anyone enraged by this word's existance? Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, but I have never seen anyone proclaim that "warfighter" is a blatant example of Newspeak or a shameless parody of L. Ron Hubbard's knack for descriptive writing.

    Has this word been around for a while? I can't recall hearing it before the advent of warblogging. If anything, it seems like a step in the wrong direction, for being a euphemism, and all (if at all).
    • Enraged? No, more like pity.

      I'll let you pick who I feel the pity for.
    • The word seems to be an obscure military jargon term. The earliest citation seems to be in 1986. [wordspy.com] Though I seem to recall the word being used in texts dating back to WWI.

    • Re:OT: Warfighter (Score:4, Informative)

      by Sinical ( 14215 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:56PM (#11399196)
      Uh, many many military folks use the word warfighter. It describes the jobs of the front-line combat service personnel from all branches of the military (not cooks or other non-combat personnel).

      "We provide the best XYZ possible to our nation's warfighters".

      I've seen it for a number of years in (a) magazines devoted to military equipment (Journal of Electronic Defense (JED)) (b) heard it from the various military customer-type people I come into contact with as a defense contractor (they may have been infected with 'bizspeak', though, for all I know).

      JED in particular has a column called "I: First Person Singular" that is usually accounts of retired service personnel describing their experience with various electronics defense systems (radar, ECM, ECCM, other EW gear) in combat situations (World War II, Korea, and Vietnam). The people writing these columns often use warfighter without any indication of discomfort or irony.

      It's a real word that is just now percolating into common usage via the enlightened interest in things military spurred on by the conflict in Iraq.
  • and one ping only.

  • 2AM (Score:5, Funny)

    by CypherXero ( 798440 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:14PM (#11397752) Homepage
    (Phone Rings)
    Boss: The router went down, we need you to fix it...now.
    You: Fuck.

  • Dropped packets. (Score:5, Funny)

    by BeProf ( 597697 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:15PM (#11397761)
    So what happens to dropped packets? Do they burn up on re-entry or go into an orbit?

  • why this is important (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kvnflynn ( 614963 )
    Currently almost all military satellite communications are point-to-point in nature. most of the time this is done by converting IP traffic to serial data before sending over the modems and satellite. this causes ip traffic to be routed back to a core facility before heading on to its final destination. being able to route IP in the sky would provide better mobile-to-mobile communications with less overhead and more dynamic in nature... both reducing delay and bandwidth.

  • So this is how SKYNET begins.... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... or the Matrix...

  • Encryption (Score:5, Funny)

    by AviLazar ( 741826 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:19PM (#11397804) Journal
    Now don't forget guys: Make sure to use WEP encryption keys and turn on your MAC filtering and change the default IP and password. And for god's sake, change the SSID from linksys to something else.
  • I'm not sure that it does.

    Is IP really the protocol to use under these conditions? Is there something better?

    Thoughts, comments welcome

  • Space Router (Score:4, Funny)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:27PM (#11397913) Journal
    To put nice rounded edges on space cabinetry?

  • Hardly the first router in space... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mondoz ( 672060 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:27PM (#11397915)
    The ISS (International Space Station) has been flying a Smart Switch Router for years in the Russian Segment of the onboard network.

    The Router [internet.sk]
    Here's an ISS status report that mentions it. [lib.cas.cz]

  • A Dynamic DNS client so you can host spacerouter.kicks-ass.net out of your secret bunker.
    It's stackable, so that you can puts your Space Access Point and Space Cable Modem on top of it.
    AOL Parental Filters and Zone Alarm integration, to keep out terrorists and keep troops safe from porn.
    Web Based Administration, just point your command and control laptop to http://192.168.1.1
    WEP is used as the super strong security protocol protecting data too and from your computers.
    In a few months Linux hackers will find
  • In other news, many l33t hax0rs will start turning their satellite dishes around hoping to sniff the admin password of the space router. God bless the telnet.
    (and the password will be cisco/space)

  • Giant-Ass Cantenna... (Score:3, Funny)

    by catdevnull ( 531283 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:44PM (#11398115)


    What would the SSID be for that bad boy?
    • Bush Clan LAN
    • RummyNet
    • 0wn3d by Osama

    Hmmm....redifines War Driving!
  • What? Not one mention of how nice it would be to have a beowulf cluster of those in orbit? You people are slipping...
  • The regional governors now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line.

  • ping times (Score:3, Informative)

    by XO ( 250276 ) <blade.eric@gmEIN ... minus physicist> on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:14PM (#11398518) Homepage Journal
    Well, if it's in orbit, the ping time will be around 750ms minimum, as it takes about that long for a satellite internet connection to return a ping. About 600ms to go from terrestrial to orbit and back again, + processing time and such.

  • The way our military works (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kurt555gs ( 309278 ) <kurt555gs@nOsPaM.ovi.com> on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @04:37PM (#11401036) Homepage
    The router will support Gopher as it's main protocol.

    Why are all things the US government does always so far behind comercial development?

    Oh well , it's just the way it is.

  • Wonder no more.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by da3dAlus ( 20553 ) <dustin.grau@REDHATgmail.com minus distro> on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @05:17PM (#11401633) Homepage Journal
    "I wonder what the ping times would be like..."

    Astronomical!

    [...cricket...]

    Aw, c'mon, "space-hardened IP router"...astronomical? Eh, fine, you make a better joke.

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