Apparently they send email up to the space station…
The next tourist on the International Space Station could prove to be very useful.
Charles Simonyi, one of the inventors of Microsoft’s Word program, is preparing to travel to the station just as NASA stopped sending the orbiting laboratory Word documents out of fear of transmitting computer viruses.
“We’re not getting any (Word documents) on e-mail or in the daily summary,” station commander Michael Lopez-Alegria grumbled Wednesday. He asked for an update on “where we are with this — I don’t know if I can say it, but I will — virus situation.”
Astronaut Terry Virts in Mission Control promised to send a memo to Lopez-Alegria, “but not via Word document attachment.”
If I were on the space station, I would spend every spare moment just looking at the earth (or goofing off in zero gravity). You can websurf anytime, but the opportunities to do those two things are rather limited down here.
Whatever the reason, the lack of communications bandwidth isn’t what prevents having an Internet connection on the ISS. There is, as already noted, a large amount of telemetry and environment data that constantly streams from and to the station, including high bandwidth video and audio. A small channel devoted to a TCP/IP stream would hardly be missed, and even if it were, a small antenna and transceiver could be used to connect across the amateur packet radio network (AMPRNet), albeit at very low bandwidth (600 baud). I suspect the real reason is that no one sees a need to modify the existing system to accomodate open Internet access. All necessary information to do work is transmitted from ground control, and the astronauts/cosmonauts work long shifts in just doing basic maintenance and the marginal amount of work to monitor science experiments.
The concern with viruses and malware is not an insignificant problem. NASA (on the ground) has been plagued with a number of e-mail and Microsoft Office/VBA viruses just like any other large organization; while such an attack wouldn’t affect the proprietary systems on the ISS or the Space Shuttle, it could shut down use of a computer that was otherwise intended to function with some experiments. For this reason, the first PC laptops that were sent up on-board the STS were running Linux (Slackware, I believe) as the operating system.
Regarding the ISS is a military/surveillance platform, this is an entirely manufactured, spurious, and baseless claim. Neither NASA nor the European Space Agency are or have ever been military organizations. Roskosmos, the Russian space agency, was a quasi-military bureau in the Soviet Era, but now manages only non-military programs. NASA has in the past contracted with the Air Force to deliver ELINT surveillance satellites, which was a result of the desire of Congress to justify the STS as the singular heavy lift vehicle, but post-Challenger has sought to minimize the use of the STS as a payload delivery system, favoring the venerable Titan III (in the 34D configuration), Delta II, and Atlas II/Centaur (although some launch support services were provided by contract to NASA). The ISS does not “launch spy sat’s and eject the toilet waste over our enemy to demoralize them.”
Communication with Mars Exploration Rovers is limited not only by line of sight access by the Deep Space Network transmitters/radio antenna, but also rotation of Mars. Given that the Rovers often spent time down in valleys where line of sight to the horizon (and thus to the Mars Odyssey spacecraft which functions as a relay to Earth) is limited, 90 minutes or so of access a day isn’t unreasonable, and of course there will be at least a couple of weeks or so of the year that Mars would be completely unreachable, being behind or in the corona of the Sun.