NASA Fires Lasers At the ISS (theverge.com) 28
joshuark shares a report from The Verge: NASA researchers have successfully tested laser communications in space by streaming 4K video footage originating from an airplane in the sky to the International Space Station and back. The feat demonstrates that the space agency could provide live coverage of a Moon landing during the Artemis missions and bodes well for the development of optical communications that could connect humans to Mars and beyond. NASA normally uses radio waves to send data and talk between the surface to space but says that laser communications using infrared light can transmit data 10 to 100 times faster than radios. "ISS astronauts, cosmonauts, and unwelcomed commercial space-flight visitors can now watch their favorite porn in real-time, adding some life to a boring zero-G existence," adds joshuark. "Ralph Kramden, when contacted by Ouiji board, simply spelled out 'Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!'"
Deep DR Planning. (Score:2)
The horrors of one’s digital debauchery going dark in deep space may be the ultimate argument for an old school anal-og plan of packing the dead tree porn in between the DR and the BCP.
Remember kids. In space, no one can hear you cream.
I can see the warning label now (Score:2)
Do NOT look at Laser with remaining good I--SS. :-)
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This is what they get for overstaying their welcome by a month [slashdot.org].
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you will hit your cap long before one can go out
10 to 100 times faster than radios (Score:4, Insightful)
I know they meant bandwidth, but this needs to be explicitly stated.
"10 to 100 times faster than radios" could also be interpreted as time elapsed between source and destination, which is simply not true.
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We see the same nonsense with broadband providers, when they talk about speed they mean bandwidth not latency. The regulators should really clamp down on this deceptive dumbing down IMHO.
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Folks, people don't care about bandwidth. They want to know how long it takes for their download to be complete. Time taken from something being there to it being here is colloquially called "speed". "Bandwidth" is just as much of a misnomer anyway, because modern internet access technologies have huge bandwidth, but use time-sliced protocols and rate limiting, so the physical bandwidth tells you nothing about the data rate you can expect.
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Well, this is space communication.
People care both about how long it takes for download to complete, as well as how quickly can the other party respond to your message.
While #1 is positively affected by using laser-based communication, #2 is not affected at all. Therefore, when talking about it, one needs to be specific, otherwise the same people who "don't care about bandwidth" might have the impression you can Facetime in real-time with Mars or whatever.
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The people who care enough about this subject know what latency, bandwidth and data rate are and what "speed" means in this context. Everybody else doesn't care. It's popular science. Just look at the article picture of the laser: It's a visible beam in space and has lens flare FFS. Get a grip.
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Why bother writing correctly, then? People smart enough to decipher bad writing will do so anyway, and the others don't need to. Right?
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Know your audience. The target audience would need an explanation for the more precise terminology. The goal is to be understood, not to be technically correct.
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> when they talk about speed they mean bandwidth not latency
Well, it's a factor in the bandwidth delay product and underlying hardware.
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We see the same nonsense with broadband providers, when they talk about speed they mean bandwidth not latency. The regulators should really clamp down on this deceptive dumbing down IMHO.
People care about bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss. The last two are the likely reasons why I have trouble doing video meetings from my house in the Bay Area that's walking distance from our nearest corporate office. And it seems to be host-specific, i.e. work stuff is slow and everything else is fine. Same problem with Zoom, though less often. Problem occurs whether I'm on Wi-Fi or wired, and it's Comcast Business, so they're not supposed to be throttling anything.
Basically, without end-to-e
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People care about bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss.
Well, you do, and for good reason (per the rest of your post.) But most people don't even know what those things are, let alone how important they are.
What I'd really like to see is a standardized score that takes into account all of the above. [...]
And you go on to discuss some metrics. Great, but I think analogies are easier for non-technical people. Consider two highways with the same speed-limit, one with a single lane in each direction, and the other with 5 lanes in each direction. The multi-lane highway is not 5 times as fast but it can support 5 times as much traffic. Other things are analogous, l
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What I'd really like to see is a standardized score that takes into account all of the above. [...]
And you go on to discuss some metrics. Great, but I think analogies are easier for non-technical people.
Analogies are fine, and yours seem plausible, but they don't provide a way to directly compare two ISPs, which is kind of the point of the post I was replying to. If we could compel ISPs to use a common metric that is more comprehensive than just bandwidth, you could actually look at those numbers and in both cases (mean value and standard deviation) just teach people that smaller numbers are better, and they could directly compare ISPs without having to understand it at all. And that's ultimately more us
We won't go to Mars (Score:2)
The only person who at least pretends to try is batshit insane. Laser free space optical connections are a necessary development to counter satellite interference from hostile countries, not for deep space communication.
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Lasers are also pretty good for reducing signal interception.
However, I'm not sure the requirement of an aerial platform makes the setup ideal. From the safety of my anonymous keyboard, I'm going to suggest that a ground-based maser system would be preferable.
Pew Pew Pew (Score:2)
Long live Princess Leia and her kin.
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Good luck has its storms. - George Lucas
Catching up... (Score:1)
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Apparently Starlink uses optical for intra-satellite communications with an unpublished bandwidth, while this report is about wideband to and from a plane to ISS, and is another important milestone for affording Pr0n In Space.
Space Lasers! (Score:2)
So now we actually do have jewish* space lasers! Alex was right all along, the frigging frogs are gay, and now jewish space lasers will burn your house unless your roof is blue.
*I assume that at least on NASA employee is jewish.
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Given the amount of visibility that group has in the news media, it's actually quite small. About 2.4% of the US identifies as Jewish.
I am fully ready to be told I've been misled by the media, but it really seems like the highest concentrations would be in New York and California, possibly making it significantly likely there is nobody Jewish in any particular NASA working group.
Uh oh... (Score:2)
At least now we know where the next air leak in the ISS came from...
Missile would be cheaper (Score:1)
Or just let Russia or India sell for scrap.