Interplanetary Communication With Robots Tested by NASA

image credit: NASA/JPL

In what is being called a success toward developing “an interplanetary Internet,” NASA and the European Space Agency controlled an Earth-based robot in Germany from the International Space Station.

The new communications protocol is named Disruption Tolerant Networking and is being hailed as a “giant leap for space exploration” in its ability to “hop” across typical communication breaks and errors that would occur within the Earth-based Internet Protocol system. (Source)

Although it is in its infancy and has very limited applications, one of the team leaders for this initiative is Vinton Cerf, who prominently factors into the history of the Internet. This new space-based Internet, similar to the original, appears to be rooted in military and intelligence connections.

Cerf is an alumnus of Stanford, which spawned The Stanford Research Institute that worked in conjunction with a host of government agencies, including DARPA, to create Internet communications as Cerf himself admits. Cerf has also worked for CIA-connected Google as an “Internet Evangelist.” The Internet from the beginning seems to have been tailor made to adopt some of the backdoor surveillance we are witnessing today. (Source)

With the introduction of robotic control from space, it’s not a stretch to imagine the potential merger of land- and spaced-based communications among machines of war, including autonomous systems … on an interplanetary scale. Principal analyst, Rob Enderle, of the Enderle Group agrees:

This is on the evolutionary path to communications technologies used for space exploration, and it’s ideal for warfare — and Defense is likely the biggest funding source for it. (Source)

This appears at the moment to be a quite distant possibility, but we would do well to keep in mind that what is revealed to the public is often a minimum of decades behind what is actually possible.

Read other articles by Nicholas West Here