A stream of consciousness from the brain of B.K. DeLong
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June 21, 2004
A quick braindump of sorts as I have a lot of other things to talk about at some point including my son's "1 month birthday" and my 5th anniversary with Kirky as well as BrainStream's fourth birthday.
I watched Mission to Mars last night and got thinking about space travel - especially since the world's first commercial space launch happened today - though, in my opinion it's been getting startlingly little coverage. As I write this, news is being spread all over the globe that SpaceShipOne has punched through space and has successfully landed right where it took off.
To bring this back to FOAF and the Internet, what about Interplanetary and Space-based IP? We're going to have to turn to IPv6 to get .luna, .earth , .mars (it was suggested to me .luna instead of .moon because other planets have moons). And GPS - how is GPS measured on the moon? on Mars? And what about spatial location in space itself? In orbit or travelling.
Always have to think ahead.
As far as I know, we'd have to set up new GPS constellations for the moon and Mars.
In terms of determining trajectories and locations in space....you'd have to agree upon a common reference frame (for objects in this solar system, sun-centered would be easiest; for the galaxy, probably something in relation to the cosmic background radiation) and plug in the known orbital parameters of the planets and moons and such. Thankfully, observational astronomy lets us plug those values in with a fair degree of certainty.