Video for our “Communicating over Extreme Distances” webinar held earlier this summer is available at: https://livestream.com/internetsociety/lasercomm If you wish a copy of the presentation materials, you may request them directly from the presenter: boroson@ll.mit.edu

IPNSIG welcomes new Secretariat for AWG IPNSIG is pleased to announce the selection of Helen Tabunshchyk to play the role of Secretariat for our Architecture & Governance Working Group (AWG). This adds a critical resource necessary to the success of the AWG. We appreciate Helen’s willingness to undertake this responsibility, and look forward to her contributions towards achieving the goals of the AWG.

IPNSIG Receives Tax Exempt Status from the US Internal Revenue Service The Interplanetary Networking Special Interest Group (IPNSIG) has received confirmation from the US Internal Revenue Service that it is now qualified to operate as a non-profit, charitable, tax-exempt organization. In simple terms, this means that donations to IPNSIG can be treated by donors as tax-deductible contributions for US Federal Income Tax purposes. The IPNSIG Board believes that this status will provide additional incentive for supporters to provide resources that allow IPNSIG to accomplish its primary mission: to help standardize and demonstrate the readiness of the Bundle Protocol Suite to support the implementation of a Solar System Internet that can, in turn, support the exploration and eventual colonization of the Solar System. This was also the last major milestone to accomplish in order to formalize our status as an Internet Society Chapter (rather than a SIG). ISOC has changed the way they manage SIGs, and it made more sense for us to continue our affiliation with the Internet Society as a Chapter. However, we will be retaining the name IPNSIG in order to avoid confusion with many of our external friends, who have been used to referring to us as IPNSIG for over twenty years. We are incorporated in the State of California as IPNSIG, Inc. We want to thank especially our Secretary/Treasurer, Michael Snell, for his persistent due diligence in accomplishing this registration. Yosuke Kaneko, on behalf of the IPNSIG Board

We are glad to share that the IPNSIG Architecture and Governance Working Group (AWG) held a workshop on Routing in Delay and Disruption Tolerant Networking over four days, from August 22 to 25, 2022. The goal of the workshop was to look at the various routing approaches and to produce a recommendation toward realizing a common interplanetary network architecture. During the workshop, the group looked into the following routing approaches: Routing in European Space Agency (ESA) Bundle Protocol (BP) Implementation , presented by Felix Flentge Schedule-Aware Bundle Routing (SABR), also known as Contact Graph Routing (CGR) , presented by Scott Burleigh REDMARS Routing , presented by Marius Feldmann and Felix Walter Spacetime Routing, presented by Brian Barritt Shortest-Path Tree Routing for Space Networks (SPSN) , presented by Olivier de Jonckere) Opportunistic forwarding approaches – constrained flooding PROPHeT, Spray and Wait , presented by Juan Fraire Opportunistic CGR , presented by Scott Burleigh Inter-Regional Forwarding , presented by Scott Burleigh As a result, AWG has produced the following recommendation: The IPNSIG, as an organization under the Internet Society, advocates the concept of establishing a common, interoperable, autonomous and scalable routing framework within the Solar System Internet. We believe this is crucial to achieving a resilient and sustainable communication environment in space. We express our willingness to facilitate and expect interested communities to further pursue the refinement and advancement of a technical solution in support of this goal. We underline four important aspects for the future of Routing in Solar System Internet: Autonomy The overall goal is to populate forwarding tables or routing tables (where appropriate) without human intervention and depart from the Earth-centric management scheme Commonality To enable Autonomy we need a common and standardized way of the following: The population of a Forwarding and (where routes are computed) Routing Table Function enabling the bundle protocol agent to access a forwarding table API that answers the question: “where should I send this bundle and with what CLA/address?”, similar to ARP lookup Interoperability Define a common to every Node set of functions Interoperability Inter-regional routing should be based on a common standard Intra-regional routing could be heterogeneous, adopting methods that suit the needs of a specific environment or a mission Inter- and Intra-region routing should be interoperable Scalability Architecture needs to be structured in some way (Hierarchy) Node IDs, Addressing Schemes, and segmenting concepts need to be further explored to accommodate the scale of the SSI You can find the summary report here and our recommendations report here .

Great discussion today at our space Internet governance seminar. Dr. Scott Pace’s prepared remarks were extremely informative, covering all aspects of the National Space Council and its inter-agency role within the federal government. The discussion between Dr. Pace and Dr. Vint Cerf regarding potential paths forward towards establishing some kind of international governance model was outstanding. A recording of the video webinar is available at: https://livestream.com/internetsociety/spaceig/videos/209555530 Dr. Vinton Cerf (one of the “Fathers of the Internet” and one of the driving forces in InterPlanetary Networking) and Dr. Scott Pace (Deputy Assistant to the President and Executive Secretary of the National Space Council) led the discussion. Scott Burleigh (NASA/JPL’s chief Delay & Disruption Tolerant Networking architect) moderated the discussion. There was some time at the end for questions. Discussion Questions: Do we need a governance model for the Internet in space (what will become the Solar System Internet, or SSI)? If so, what kind of framework should such a governance model have? Who are the stake holders? What kinds of input should they receive? What kinds of enforcement are available (or desirable)? Do existing organizations or models exist that could be useful in forming a framework for moving forward?

Date: February 20, 2024 Time: 2 – 4 p.m. (Pacific) Location: Virtual (Google Meet link here) All Chapter members and all Internet Society members are invited to attend the meeting. Come and learn about the Interplanetary Chapter’s accomplishments in 2023 and our opportunities and challenges looking ahead to 2024. Meet our Working Group Leaders and learn more about their activities and plans. Finally, meet our newly elected Board Members. A more detailed agenda will be published in mid-February. Join us!

IPNSIG is using Zotero to build a catalog of technical documentation around Delay & Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) and other Interplanetary Networking topics. Follow this link to our Zotero Library .

The video recording and presentation materials for January’s IPNSIG Academy presentation by Dr. Keith Scott are now available. The video is available here . The presentation is available here . We’d like to thank Dr. Scott again for his really interesting and engaging presentation about the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) DTN Standardization Efforts.

STINT 2022 Workshops Videos Now Available Videos of this year’s Space-Terrestrial Internetworking Workshops (STINT) included presentations from quite a few IPNSIG members (including our President, Kaneko and Board Members Oscar Garcia and Alberto Montilla). Session videos are available here . A list of the program topics and presenters is available here .

Did you know the IPNSIG Academy Keynotes are available online? If you missed one or more keynote in 2022-2023, visit the Events page to view the keynote list and pop directly to the video (hosted by ISOC) and slides (if available).

IPNSIG February Newsletter Dear Membership, On behalf of the IPNSIG board, I am pleased to announce the launch of the “IPNSIG Academy” – an educational platform that will cultivate interest, and passion which will result in building expertise in future generations as they work toward realizing an Interplanetary Network (IPN) in the coming 100 years. Our vision at IPNSIG is focused upon enabling a common Solar System Internet (SSI) infrastructure that would benefit all humanity. Instilling this vision and conveying it to future generations will push us forward in that bold endeavor. The “IPNSIG Academy” will serve to propel those efforts by kicking off a series of talks, covering multiple facets surrounding the Interplanetary Network and SSI. In 2022, the IPNSIG Academy will start by addressing the 100 year long-term vision of IPN/SSI; its technological developments (mainly in the area of the DTN protocols), its architectural concepts and issues around governance that would support the operation of the architecture and infrastructure. We have engaged many prestigious and prominent speakers from around the globe. They will be delivering talks relevant to each of these IPN areas. The last session will culminate in a workshop in which we will have discussions on Architecture and Governance with the entire membership. (The detailed program will be posted on the IPNSIG website soon.) IPNSIG continues to strive to do great things together with our membership and again, we are really excited to get engaged with you all at the Academy! We will update you with dates and times for each of the talks in further newsletters. For any inquiries on this newsletter, please drop a note here: < secretariat@ipnsig.org > Sincerely, Yosuke Kaneko IPNSIG Chair

Two key technologies required to enable the exploration and exploitation of the solar system are space data communications systems and space vehicle propulsion. While the development of the core communication protocols (Delay & Disruption tolerant Networking (DTN)) is quite robust, deployment and planned adoption is essentially limited to space agency missions to earth orbit and the planned Lunar Gateway and LunaNet. NASA is committed to using DTN for manned missions to Mars, but other than some high-level architecture papers, there are no concrete plans for the development of the proposed Solar System Internet (SSI). That is somewhat understandable, given the natural conservatism of space agencies and the uncertainty of long-range planning when a changeable Congress holds the budget strings. In fact, there are many reasons for optimism about the future of DTN: The IETF DTN Working Group is slowly but surely cranking out DTN standards CCSDS is concomitantly cranking out Blue Books (recommended standards for civilian space flight) DTN is used for some comms on ISS NASA is committed to DTN for Lunar Gateway and LunaNet (after some initial hesitancy—as recently as mid 2019 they were planning to use TCP/IP) NASA/JPL continues to publish updates to ION (NASA’s implementation of the Bundle Protocols) Commercialization of space is coming fast– YET… adoption is slow… It’s mostly all about TCP/IP for now The reason for this bullet can be explained by the graphic to the left: it’s all about where business investments are now and how those regions of space are affected by delay. The vast majority of even planned commercial use of space is concentrated within Low and Medium Earth Orbit (LEO & MEO) satellites—within the green circle. There is no significant delay here and current terrestrial communication protocols (like TCP/IP) work just fine. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” The next major commercial thrust will be in cislunar space. That’s the region generally enclosed by the yellow ellipse in the graphic. Here, TCP/IP kinda sorta works, and given the NRCO orbit of the Lunar Gateway, which never loses LOS with Earth, NASA was originally tempted to use it. We wrote about this back in 2019, urging NASA to use DTN instead for a variety of reasons. Doubtless for reasons other than our blog posting, NASA decided to deploy DTN on Lunar Gateway and LunaNet. We assume that commercial entities involved in the initial business endeavors on the moon will therefore be using DTN. The third region (depicted by the open-ended red ellipse in the graphic) is where the delay becomes so great that TCP definitely breaks. DTN will not be optional. But no one besides space agencies is doing anything out here. Yet. The draw to exploit this region will be irresistible. “The first trillionaires will be those who mine in space”—Neal Degrasse Tyson. Forbes magazine, Bloomberg News and other pundits are predicting that commercialization of space—particularly Near Earth Asteroids (NEA’s) represents a huge business opportunity. Some go even further, saying that our ability to mine Technology-Critical Elements (TCE’s) from space is critical to the very survival of our increasingly technology-dependent civilization. TCE’s are a group of about 35 elements (about 17 Rare Earth elements, 6 platinum group elements and another 12 “assorted” elements). They are critical to emerging technologies either because of their rarity (as in “Rare Earth Elements”) a striking increase in demand, or both. An example would be tantalum, which is required for the manufacture of capacitors and resistors contained in most electronic devices. A small number of asteroids are expected to be significant sources of these rare (on earth) elements particularly the platinum group elements. Their high value-to-mass ratio may make it worthwhile to transport them back to earth. DTN is an established technology waiting for adoption by the emerging space industries (and buildout of required infrastructure). There is another arena where development is needed in order to support the opportunities for expanded exploration and exploitation of space: improved propulsion systems for space vehicles. There have been drastic improvements in the cost per pound of boosting satellites into orbit. That has been coupled with the miniaturization of satellites themselves to make Cube Sats available to small businesses and graduate students alike. But conventional rockets are still really inefficient in terms of the amount of fuel required to put payload into orbit. This is typically expressed in terms of Payload Fraction (what percentage of the entire spacecraft launch weight does the payload represent?). While some newer platforms represent substantial improvements, most haven’t improved much since the days of the Apollo missions. Case in point: the Payload Fraction for the Space-X Starship (4.3%) is only slightly better than the Saturn V (5.3%) to boost payload into Earth orbit. However, the Payload Fraction for the Saturn V dropped to less than 1.5% when boosting to escape velocity. As the photo at left shows, even the most powerful rockets are metal tubes of mostly fuel… There are a number of small companies involved in potentially game-changing development work on technologies like Nuclear Thermal Rockets, solar wind sails and others that can vastly improve Payload Fraction, reduce fuel costs as well as reduce travel times to Jupiter and beyond. There is an excellent webinar produced by Space Matters available on YouTube with representatives from a number of these companies discussing the technologies involved as well as the challenges to overcome. It is available for viewing at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th4ISGnhcLs. They are a relatively new YouTube Channel, but seem to be producing several videos a month. They also have a profile of astronaut Story Musgrave and another webinar on space policy. Check them out!