Towards an Internet in Space

[zavvy]

<b>Towards an Internet in Space</b><br /><br />LINK<br /><br />The internet, or at least the protocols behind it, are being extended into space. The man credited by many with having created the net, Vint Cerf, explains his vision of an interplanetary net. <br /><br /><i>"While I was a graduate student at UCLA I wound up working on a programme sponsored by something called the defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise known as Arpa. <br /><br />My job was to write software for the computers that we ultimately started putting on the Arpanet in late 1969. <br /><br />In the spring of 1973 one of my colleagues, Robert Kahn, described to me the different packet-switched networks that he was working on: the Arpanet that he and I both participated in, a mobile radio system, and a satellite-based data system. <br /><br />His problem was 'how do I get all three of these networks to inter-work with each other?'. <br /><br />We called that the "inter-net" problem because we were trying to get different "nets" to talk to each other. <br /><br />Within about six months of that meeting, we had come up with a basic design of what we now know today as the internet. <br /><br />We made a detailed description and by May 1974, almost exactly 30 years ago, we had published a paper that described how this could work and what the various pieces were. <br /><br />That thing we described 30 years ago is in large measure what you have today. <br /><br />We did not have all the applications written out but we had the underlying infrastructure for the communication. <br /><br />Unfinished work <br /><br />I then asked myself a question: What might we do to take advantage of what we have learned in building networks? <br /><br />The internet in particular, this global system - what might we do to take those lessons and apply them to the support of the exploration of the solar system? <br /><br />What you should appreciate</i>