Think your DSL is slow? Astronauts in Space Struggle to Maintain Dial Up Speeds
Think your DSL is slow? Astronauts in Space Struggle to Maintain Dial Up Speeds
Posted 07/02/2011 at 2:29pm
| by Justin Kerr
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When you think about space exploration you assume our astronauts are on the cutting edge of technology right? Turns out this is only partially true, and modern space explorers have a number of challenges to deal with that have been solved here on earth. During an uncensored question and answer period in Edmonton, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield admitted to a young onlooker that the Internet in space is too slow for gaming, but that he finds plenty of other ways to fill his time.
“The spacecraft travels at eight kilometers per second, the speed of the station's Internet connection is about the same as dial-up.”
Asking if astronauts play online games in space no doubt had the parents chuckling in a somewhat embarrassed fashion, but the fact that our modern space fleet has to make do with so little bandwidth is certainly an interesting bit of trivia. I wonder if the NASA marking team calls it 4G and caps them at 5GB?
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Tweak_BL
July 05, 2011 at 4:14am
Hughesnet handles alot of Goverment based transmitions thru their private communications.Its no big secret that they handle alot of Vsat over in the areas we are at war with for our troops.
I do not believe for a minute that the technology is not there to give at least the same speed I get on Hughesnet.They are already halfway past the 40000 mile mark that I send and recieve to.So if anything their latency would be much better.
@Krtek...WOW DOES care about latency...next time one is in a group and sees someone type its Raining I am gonna DC then u will know.WOW is good for leveling and 5 mans,but I highly suggest Rolling a Paladin as Tank or forget about tanking and just DPS.Being able to front load aggro is a big plus with Paladins.You can forget about cutting edge Raiding though.
800+ ms Latency on a good day.
d3v
July 03, 2011 at 8:05am
I think they have slightly better things to do than waste their time online. Also I don't find this surprising at all. There in space after all. Everything is in short supply up there.
Teeebs
July 02, 2011 at 11:38pm
So no porn for those poor astronauts. However do they cope being cooped up in a space station with two other guys for months at a time.... ha ha
mikeart03a
July 02, 2011 at 8:25pm
Even then, satellite connections are about line of sight. Furthermore, the time it takes to encode, beam and route a signal is also quite extensive.
blimpboy3
July 02, 2011 at 2:47pm
strange, you would think they would latch on to a nearby network satelite and the difference in velocities would be smaller than being compared to a stationary point on the ground
Krtek
July 03, 2011 at 5:41am
There appears to be a special set of sattelites for communication with the ISS, which are geostationary.
Wiki states that the communication speed should be "3Mbps up and 10Mbps down". But it's probably used for transmitting a truck-load of other data in favor of youtube videos or games. And on top of that, it might not be the bandwidth that makes gaming impossible. I think latency would be much more of a problem as the communication is probably routed through the special satellites and then through special ground stations. Making gaming virtually impossible. Except, maybe WoW and the likes, which don't really care much about latency.
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