It’s always nice to see NASA embrace creative forms of fundraising. The space agency continues to look to Lego as an advertising partner with a recent experiment which showed that an astronaut in orbit can maintain a strong enough open network connection to remotely drive a piece of product placement on the planet’s surface. Sunita Williams, current ISS commander, controlled a small Lego-branded robot at the ESA headquarters in Germany, and in so doing proved a landmark invention on the road to manned interplanetary missions.

The innovation itself is just the next logical step in the evolution of the internet. When the internet was first invented by the mad geniuses at the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (it was then called the ARPAnet), its primary aim was to make communications impervious to the bomb. With the Cold War in full swing, and nuclear weapons swelling to almost a hundred megatons in yield, defense technology had to accommodate the possibility that a single node or storage site might be erased, instantly. The situation demanded a solution with massive redundancy and the ability to dynamically reroute information, but ARPA (now DARPA) ultimately had it easy; it only had to plan for nuclear war, while NASA’s obstacles include everything from radiation blasts to the curvature of space-time itself.



The breakthrough on display in the Lego experiment was NASA’s ARPA-like innovation in networking: Disruption Tolerant Networking, or the DTN protocol, which again looks to inoculate communications against disruptions and equipment failures. The basic idea of applying networking to space communications has been in use since NASA first began using orbiters as go-betweens for speaking to rovers, such as Curiosity, on the surface of Mars. As scientists slowly worked to find the most reliable and efficient route through the gauntlet of orbital schedules and solar flares, they slowly built the foundations of a new transmission protocol, one resistant to the delays and random interference of space. Co-creator Keith Scott compared a packet’s journey from Earth to the Martian surface to Frogger’s journey across a wide and busy highway, though NASA’s game is time-dilated and played at the speed of light.

DTN is an important step toward sending humans to other planets. It might allow, for instance, astronauts to direct the early stages of a settlement mission from orbit, before descending themselves. With enough improvement in transmission times, however, such astronauts may be rendered unnecessary altogether. One of the easiest ways to improve the transmission speed (if not the cheapest) would be to launch additional satellites, since the current orbiting schedule only allows only about ten minutes of connectivity per day. As more are sent to orbit the Red Planet, DTN will become an increasingly integral to squeezing the most out of the nascent interplanetary internet. The theoretical speed limit of communication with Mars is eight minutes — four light minutes there, and four back. If NASA could reach that eight-minute asymptote often and with high reliability, a good portion of our would-be space explorers may find that their country no longer has need of their services.

Transmission speed is just part of the problem, of course, and Williams’ remote controlled capitalism drove dutifully around its lab despite receiving just 1.42KB/s from the ISS. For a rover to be meaningfully controlled from Earth would require greater throughput as well as a faster delivery time, as would photos uploaded from the surface or personal video for the astronauts. Still, as the technology creeps forward, we should remember that the first infant steps of the ARPAnet were just as shaky, and in pursuit of precisely the same goal. (See: Changing the world: DARPA’s top inventions). Their early quest to fortify communication on Earth had the effect of shrinking the planet immensely — who knows what might happen if NASA can pull the same trick on our solar system as a whole.

Now read: Inside NASA’s Curiosity: It’s an Apple Airport Extreme… with wheels