5 ms·
This isn't that hard to do, even with 1960s technology. It takes about 3 days with the Apollo launch system to get from the Earth to the Moon. So if you load
by midoridensha 4y ago
This isn't that hard to do, even with 1960s technology.
It takes about 3 days with the Apollo launch system to get from the Earth to the Moon. So if you load roughly 800 4TB portable hard drives into one of these and fly it to the Moon, this will result in an average transmission speed of 100Gbps, if my math is correct.
- inetknght 4y agoBut goodness the ping time sucks in that one!
- midoridensha 4y agoSure, but if people only focus on bandwidth and ignore latency, as they usually do, my solution is easily done with off-the-shelf technology.
- airstrike 4y agoGood luck slapping 800 4TB hard drives from the 1960s onto a rocket. The Delta-v on that baby would suck
- midoridensha 4y agoWell, I meant today's portable 4TB hard drives, using rocket and lander tech from the late 60s.
- CobrastanJorji 4y agoA 1960s 4 terabyte portable hard drive, you say?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- s0sa 4y agoHuh? What a bizarre nitpick. I could fit 800 4TB portable hard drives into my van, and drive to the next city. That would be a quicker data transfer than via the internet. I guess that means fiber isn’t anything notable?
- bheadmaster 4y agoAmazon Snowball works like that for large data migrations.
- paraselene_ 4y agoOr Amazon Snowmobile, which is a literal container truck on the road.
- bheadmaster 4y agoOh right, that's what I had in mind. For some reason Snowball came to my mind instead of Snowmobile. Was surprised to see that Amazon Snowball also exists and serves the same purpose :)
- icelancer 4y agoThe age old adage is part of the OP's point, tongue in cheek of course. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
- ordu 4y agoThere is an old joke of data transfer speeds reachable with a railroad car full of CDs. Though I do not know the RFC number for TCP-over-Railroad.
- elcomet 4y agoThe point is that latency also matters
- nonameiguess 4y agoThe purpose of this is to go the other way, from orbital sensor platforms that aren't intending to ever return intact. To do it your way, you'd need to send a disk-carrying vehicle into orbit, dock with the satellite, download onto the disk, and then return. Since the satellites don't exactly have USB ports on them, you couldn't do that anyway, and in practice, would still need to retrofit them with some form of high-speed data transfer mechanism to get the data onto your disks. The best option would very likely still be optical transmission, as trying to insert a cable into a USB port on something moving between 7000 to 17000 MPH is not exactly trivial. At that point, what advantage is there in sending a rocket to receive the transmission and then carry the data back when you can just use the exact same link to send the data straight to Earth? Theoretically, they could carry some number of disks into orbit, fill them, and then drop them back on parachutes. Something like that is actually what the earliest surveillance satellites did. They dropped film from orbit that the military retrieved and developed.