Great. Just when I thought I couldn’t waste any more time on the Internet, I read that the wizards at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) are trying to figure out how to take the World Wide Waste to the stars — fairly literally, apparently.

It’s been dubbed the “interplanetary internet.”

According to a report at Wired.com:

Darpa recently issued a request for information about supplying “persistent broadband ground connectivity for spacecraft in low-Earth orbit.” The idea would be to give these satellites a near-constant feed of “100 kbps or higher” two-way connectivity, with end-to-end transmission latency of less than a second. Unlike most Darpa projects, which are meant to pay off years or decades in the future, this would be a near-term attempt. The agency wants the system “operational in the 2012 to 2013 time frame.”

Brian Weeden, a former officer with U.S. Air Force Space Command and a technical adviser with the Secure World Foundation, says Darpa’s help would be most welcome.

“The protocol that the internet uses — TCP/IP — wasn’t really designed with space in mind. For one, the delay times between nodes can be big. One way to GEO [geosynchronous orbit] is 300 milliseconds at the speed of light, there and back over half a second of built-in network lag before anything else adds to it. That’s one reason why getting internet from satellites sucks right now,” he tells Danger Room.

That’s the problem with the speed of light; it seems like it’s always gumming up the works. We’ll all just have to keep a laggy interplanetary internet all because of the pesky speed limit. Someday kids living in the Valles Marineris on Mars will no doubt be grousing about how long downloads from Earth take: “I’d have gotten my homework done if my research hadn’t been eaten by one of the routers on Phobos.”

The particularly stunning thing about this project is not merely the scope, but the timeline: getting a project of this magnitude completed in three to four years defies almost everything Americans have come to expect from a government program: over budget, behind schedule, and obsolete before it can ever see the light of day, and accomplishing the opposite ends of its purported goals.

The article at Wired.com continues:

For years, Darpa — which backed much of the early research into the internet — has been working with other networking godfathers to put together an “interplanetary internet.”

(It’s funny: I didn’t realize that Al Gore, purported father of the internet, ever worked at DARPA; maybe he just let them hash out the details.)

“We’re pretty used to it but the internet is actually a pretty revolutionary construct. That you can drop a packet of data on it with only a starting and destination address and it finds its way there without any directions is pretty astonishing,” Weeden explains. “The payloads on most satellites don’t work that way — payload operators need to configure specific transponders for specific users and applications. So part of this is trying to bring those internet concepts of automatic routing and network config to satellite constellations, and perhaps to make them extensions of the land-based internet infrastructure.”

Darpa’s deadline for ideas of how to pull it off is Nov. 5.

All joking aside, the “interplanetary internet” is fascinating on a number of levels. It will represent an impressive and highly significant step forward in moving data around the satellite network. But just as significant is the implication for America’s future space program: following DARPA’s lead — often a significant indicator of future technological trends — is pointing the way to preparing for a continued, and expanding, role for man in Earth orbit and beyond. The Department of Defense is operating under the assumption that the "Space Age" is here to stay, and will require the ability to network more and more systems at greater distances.

Unfortunately, they also are operating under the assumption that it is government that will keep man in space.

Rt. Rev. James Heiser has served as Pastor of Salem Lutheran Church in Malone, Texas, while maintaining his responsibilities as publisher of Repristination Press, which he established in 1993 to publish academic and popular theological books to serve the Lutheran Church.  Heiser has also served since 2005 as the Dean of Missions for The Augustana Ministerium and in 2006 was called to serve as Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of North America (ELDoNA). An advocate of manned space exploration, Heiser serves on the Steering Committee of the Mars Society. His publications include two books; The Office of the Ministry in N. Hunnius' Epitome Credendorum (1996) and A Shining City on a Higher Hill: Christianity and the Next New World (2006), as well as dozens of journal articles and book reviews.

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RP said:

	... Looks like the Insiders want to get a leg up on negotiations with the Cardassians for a New Interplanetary Order! Well, didn't Pelosi say she was looking for "new ways to spend money"?
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October 29, 2009
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