With the exploration of space and the eventual colonization of Mars humanity needs to establish a method for improving internet connectivity for people on the surface.
One method of achieving this is to place one or more satellites in high orbit around the planet. These would use interplanetary internet(delay tolerant) technology and protocols to service requests as well as actively mirror content for primary sites located on Earth. The goal of this strategy is to reduce the latency of user requests from 8-48 minutes down to at most a few seconds for popular content.
What is needed for a single node:
- High bandwidth communications equipment similar to what would have been on the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter.
- A cluster of servers in an a spacecraft the the size of a supply module. Something similar to Microsoft’s Project Natick would be about right for a first generation. There would be a redundant capacity built in to cover eventual server failure.
- A heat management system.
- A nuclear power generation system.
Now we just need NASA, Microsoft, SpaceX, Amazon (w/Blue Origin) AWS – Mars, or Google to make it happen!
