I just saw an [article](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8988053/NASA-astronaut-Victor-Glover-shares-video-SPACE.html) about Victor Glover’s first video from space. But some Facebook troll want to ruin the experience by saying “Geez he must have a good telecommunication deal to get service up there! I can’t get it in my bathroom!”
I know that somehow they “beam” signals to NASA receivers, and those are different from what the local telco providers have, but how are they able to do this? Can the astronauts really post real-time videos on social media from a mobile device?
In: Technology
They effectively have satellite internet linked to WiFi on the station. The ISS was upgraded a couple years ago to have 600 Mbps service which is really good, but that supports *all* of their operations from mission command to software updates to personal communications.
There are a series of satellites up in higher orbit that connect to the ISS and to ground stations managed by NASA and the other space agencies. The ground stations are hooked into the main Mission Control network and also feed general internet traffic through to the station.
Their connection is really high latency like most satellite networks so its not great for gaming, but fine if you just want to upload a prerecorded video. For really big files (aka movies) they still like to send up DVDs or a hard drive with them because its more time and resource efficient.
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