Wi-Fi, Now Available On the ISS 142
Grant Henninger writes "Rejoice! The next time you have an extra $20 million and decide to visit the International Space Station you won't need to leave the window to tell all your friends how cool it is. The ISS now has a new Wi-Fi network, so all you'll need to do is fire up Twitterrific and announce how much better you are than your Earth-based friends."
Re:And we already know who is the ISP (Score:5, Informative)
Funny you should mention that.
A /. article a few months ago found [slashdot.org] that sending a text message is about 4 times as expensive (per kilobyte) as retrieving data from the Hubble.
Re:If I may suggest... (Score:2, Informative)
No, I would say that he should hire mere people for his friends and hire supermodels to follow HIM around and tell everyone how much better he is.
Re:But you will have to speak Russian (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And we already know who is the ISP (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the latency between ISS and anywhere on earth should theoretically be no worse than roughly double the time it would take to make a trip halfway around the earth via fiber. Remember, geostationary satellites have latency issues because they're about 28,000 miles away from Earth. The ISS is only about 200 miles up... approximately the distance between Miami and Orlando, or Paris and London. The only reason I even factored in as much time as I did is the fact that ISS moves relative to the earth, so in order to avoid breaking TCP/IP and give it an apparent fixed IP route to the rest of the internet, all traffic to and from it would have to pass through a single network point somewhere (probably Houston), then be forwarded via fiber to an uplink somewhere within the ISS's line of sight at that moment. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if the ISS's internet connectivity actually is implemented using more or less off the shelf cellular data technology (using NASA's frequencies, with higher-power transceivers spaced further apart, but the same general idea as CDMA or GPRS data). Then again, to cut costs, they might very well have implemented internet connectivity on the ISS by just adding two or three tracking dishes to it, and using the same satellites as VSAT internet, which WOULD subject them to the same drawbacks as terrestrial customers. God, can you imagine the headlines if ISS ended up getting FAP'ed?!? :D
Re:And we already know who is the ISP (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No mention of internet connectivity (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And we already know who is the ISP (Score:3, Informative)
The shuttle uses the K/S band links a lot more, the station is almost exclusively TDRS.
50 Mbps analog satellite modem [livejournal.com]
Re:NASA will probably cooperate (Score:3, Informative)
The ISS is definitely shielded, and believe it or not it's grounded, sort of. The ISS actually "grounds" itself by venting ionized gas, I don't remember the type of gas though. There was quite a bit mentioned about it when they had trouble deploying that one solar panel a few months back.