From: Chad Chirhart [seahawk@visi.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 06, 1999 2:03 AM
To: blue_planet@lists.imagiconline.com
Subject: [BLUE PLANET] - Interplanetary Internet


Found this on ZDnet about NASA designing an Interplanetary Internet.

A Web that's out of this world

Engineers are adapting Internet architecture
to space communications. Their goal? Turn
outer space into cyberspace.

By Alan Boyle, MSNBC
November 5, 1999 10:13 AM PT


NASA and network gurus are working together to
extend the Internet to other worlds in the next few
years. But there are some limits that not even the
World Wide Web can route around, such as the
speed of light. So the builders of the Interplanetary
Internet are going back to the basics, retooling
protocols for future communications with Mars and
beyond.

For the past year or so, the vision of the Interplanetary
Internet has been championed by such visionaries as Vinton
Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers.

"By 2040, we hope a stable interplanetary backbone can
be established between the planets," Cerf said last month
at a White House presentation.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, engineers are adapting
Internet architecture to space communications, with
funding from NASA as well as the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency's Next Generation Internet
project.

Why do it? It's not just so Mars colonists can hear a
cheery "you've got mail" from their computers in 2040 -
although space experts say a sense of connectedness
could be important in combating the isolation of
long-duration missions. At least in the short term, the
biggest users of the Interplanetary Net will not be
humans, but robots.

In fact, Adrian Hooke of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory argues that the infant Interplanetary Internet is
already in action, just as ARPANET prefigured what we
now know as the Internet. More than 100 space missions
have signed up to use protocols standardized by the
international Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems.

The current studies are defining "how we need to grow
and expand these underpinnings over the next 20-odd
years, i.e., what new protocols and communications
capabilities we will need," he said in an e-mail exchange.

The rest of the article can be found at:
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2389090,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnews01
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