Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, the Internet Society, and MCI WorldCom Senior Vice President of Internet Architecture and Technology has been pretty busy over the past year with a team of engineers. Upon checking his profile one can see that he has accomplished quite a lot since inventing TCP/IP. On Cerf’s site, there is a wealth of information concerning development of his latest project: InterPlaNet (Interplanetary Internet).
MCI WorldCom is allowing Cerf to work with a small team of network engineers at NASA’s Jet Propolsion Laboratories. Along with Cerf and the engineers are members of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the official standards body of the Internet. This project is in preparation for a single Internet communications protocol for future manned and unmanned space missions — beginning as early as upcoming 2000 Mars missions. Many individuals fancy the space-adapted TCP/IP as a means to set up a open standard for communications between space probes, communications satellites, and Lunar and Martian colonies in the future.
Standards in space offer the same advantages as standards on the earth’s internet.
The InterPlaNet project also looks to put an end to long transmission delays and intermittent data links that plague NASA’s deep-space communications. Hooke says the Internet is much more robust than NASA’s existing communications systems. “We have to deal with errors and outages on a scale that is seldom encountered in today’s Internet.”
[It is also noted] that NASA engineers and scientists who control mission spacecraft and payloads would be able to communicate with Internet-readied spacecraft using familiar Web-based tools.
