4 ms·
Seems a logical step for SpaceX. One of the biggest challenges facing Mars colonization would be internet connectivity over such tremendous distances. A super
by leonroy 10y ago
Seems a logical step for SpaceX. One of the biggest challenges facing Mars colonization would be internet connectivity over such tremendous distances.
A super cheap (relatively) satellite mesh network would be just the thing to handle Earth to Mars communications.
Getting out of left field here but could imagine the whole Solar System dotted with these. Add a few sensors to each satellite and you could start detecting and monitoring some pretty interesting metrics.
- dfox 10y agoOne of the big problems with solar-system wide internet is latency. Various protocols assume that there is some upper bound on latency, IP itself assumes that end-to-end latency is less than about 4 minutes (which is'n true for mars at least half of the time), with typical TCP/IP stack implementations requiring significantly less (5 seconds seems to be common requirement for TCP to meaningfully work, 15 seconds is quoted in RFC 791), things like SSL/TLS are latency sensitive enough that multi-hop terrestrial wireless connections can be a problem. Even when all these technical problems are solved (eg. by replacing the whole IPv4/6 with something completely different) there still remains the problem of the user experience completely changing.