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As we all know by now, today is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s moon landing, unless you are one of those few who choose not to believe the Mythbusters when they debunked the idea of a moon landing hoax. Then there’s my uncle Edward, who believes that the moon landing was faked from a soundstage located on the surface of the moon.
Today, the moon landing is humbling for those of us who think in terms of networks, routers, and switches – the Internet is amazing in its communication potential, but for all the good it’s done, it’s still essentially terrestrial. The furthest the network travels is to orbital distance – and only as a waypoint.
Because of the sheer distances involved, new technologies have to be invented and improved, like Vinton Cerf’s InterPlaNet; and just as the Apollo mission gave us digital watches, cordless drills, the joystick, the smoke alarm, and so many others, interplanetary Internet promises similar advances for computer technology – from improvements in security for electronic mail, to improved performance in communication challenged environments, like disaster recovery scenarios, the developing world, and the military at wartime.
In fact, it was earlier this month (July 7th, to be exact) that the International Space Station turned on the first node in a permanent Interplanetary Internet, using a protocol known as “Delay Tolerant Networking” (DTN for short) and is designed with huge latencies and dropped packets from solar storms, or being on the wrong side of a planet, in mind.
And while astronauts typically have more important things to do, they can Twitter. (“OMGWTFBBQ - Houston, we have a problem. :-(”)
One interesting thing I just learned was that Apollo 11 had its own minicomputer on board – minicomputer in the 1969 sense of the term – because there was a 2.5 second delay between Houston and Apollo 11 due to speed-of-light issues, and that 2.5 second delay was far too long for the astronauts, hurtling around the moon, to gather, send, retrieve, and act on data. I suppose there are parallels to cloud computing here, but I’d rather not stretch it.
Anyway, that minicomputer was the first of ever smaller and smaller computers, rather than ever larger and larger computers which characterized pre-1969 computer development. Now we have computers the size of – actually, I don’t know how small computers are nowadays; I’d mention the iPhone, but you just know someone’s coming out with a cellphone twice as powerful at half the size a month from now…
Point is, today’s a day when we can look back at one of the most powerful technological and scientific triumphs with a sense of techie-geek pride. It was the nerds with pocket protectors that got us to the moon and back. And I’m proud of that.
