Astronauts Get Internet In Space, Send First Real-Time Tweets (PICTURE)

*See picture below*

(AP, By MARCIA DUNN)

In a high-tech first -- really, really high -- astronauts in space finally have Internet access.

Space station resident Timothy Creamer has been working with flight controllers to establish Internet access from his orbital post ever since he moved in last month. On Friday, his effort paid off. He posted the first live tweet truly from space. "Hello Twitterverse!" he wrote. Before, astronauts had to send Twitter updates by e-mail to Mission Control in Houston. Then controllers posted the tweets.

The International Space Station crew can now use an on-board laptop to see a desktop computer at Mission Control, and thereby browse the Web. This remote Internet access is possible whenever there is a solid high-speed communication link.

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Comments

[drumz]

07:10 PM on 01/23/2010

So I guess that means porn in space! I bet it gets lonely up there...

[ipastor01]

01:05 AM on 01/24/2010

Well, you know those Nasa guys like to think ahead, they probable already devise a happy-sock system for zero-g g's

[JoeGdr]

04:31 PM on 01/23/2010

I can imagine their future Tweets right now:

"TTLY over China right now."

"I can see Russia from my house."

"Trying 2 eat space food. Ewww. LOLZZZZ!!!!!111"

[Eric Mann]

02:16 PM on 01/25/2010

I can see Russia...lol

[James in ucity]

07:29 PM on 01/22/2010

Part of the reason people don't like funding NASA is that we've gone from , "One small step for a man..." to, "Hello Twitterverse"

C'mon people, you're some of the best our nation has to offer.

Try a little harder.

[Eric Mann]

02:17 PM on 01/25/2010

So tell me...what would YOU have written?
I personally think its great! Remember-those first astronauts were all military men-passionate people doing the work of mankind. These days they're scientists-bit of a different mind set. "Twitterverse" is a pretty good word to coin if you ask me.

[Nate the Heretic]

06:43 PM on 01/22/2010

Attn Twitterverse: My poo bounces off the wallz. LOL!

[niite]

02:02 PM on 01/22/2010

Establishing internet them should be a no brainer.. i think the hold up was on how NASA could control the information from and to the internet for the space station.. and from their solution (the laptop can see the desktop at nasa - which is essentially remote desktop) I'd say they have found a way to do that... Kind of scary.

[jsarets]

03:08 PM on 01/22/2010

NASA lets astronauts use twitter on the ground to provide updates on mission preparations and such. I highly doubt they are actively censored, although I'm sure there are rules.

The KU-band communications link is not a packet-switched bus like ethernet, so it doesn't translate well to the standard TCP/IP stack. The link was designed to transmit text, voice, and video streams. They send email "packets" as text streams via ground computers that provide the SMTP service.

The remote desktop solution makes more sense than developing a custom IP stack and securing ISS computer systems from direct interaction with the internet and its various maladies.

[Gover]

09:01 PM on 01/22/2010

Something tells me this guy probably knows what he's talking about.

[niite]

02:02 PM on 01/23/2010

Oh yeah, I was just schooled on that one! Thanks for the explanation jsarets.

[Mark Berryhill]

01:39 PM on 01/22/2010

I had always worried about how they could possibly masturbate in space, godspeed you brave pioneers.

[jsarets]

03:11 PM on 01/22/2010

When we sometimes take Russian cosmonauts to the ISS on the Space Shuttle, Roscosmos provisions for middeck stowage of a so-called "psychological support pack" that contains, among other things, "liquids and magazines".

[FranklinCat]

03:35 PM on 01/22/2010

The whole space station is nothing but a masturbatory engineering toy. More science and engineering spin-off would have come from the Super Collider, but the knowledge adverse in Congress couldn't grasp that.

[Amock]

03:57 PM on 01/22/2010

A waste? How else are we expected to launch a manned mission to Jupiter in pursue of the Life form that dispatched the "black monolith" to Earth. Duh!

[floobydust]

01:28 PM on 01/22/2010

This is NOT news. NASA has long been ten years behind anyone else on this planet.

Duh.

[NickCatal]

10:33 AM on 01/25/2010

NASA also has to deal with a vehicle that circles the globe at an amazing speed and has to switch satellites it communicates with as it circles the globe. It also has to deal with major security issues that are far more important than an astronaut having access to Twitter. The software developed for space exploration is probably the most tested and reviewed code in the world. Lets not forget that you have to radiation-harden this equipment and the software you run has to have basically 100% uptime, and even then it has to have redundancy if something goes wrong.

Just because you can do something on your home computer doesn't mean it translates at all when you are dealing with space exploration.