SUPERIOR, Colo.--If you remember the scene from Pixar's "Wall-E," in which a rocket ship on its way to humankind's space station blasts through a debris field of abandoned satellites, you may have wondered if anyone on Earth is working to prevent that from becoming reality.
The answer is yes.
Here in this small town not far from Boulder, Colo., the Secure World Foundation (SWF), a nonprofit unassociated with any government, is thinking about that kind of issue, as well as several others related to the fair use of space, and succeeding at getting its analysis and recommendations heard by decision makers around the world.
The Secure World Foundation is a nonprofit that is advocating for the fair use of outer space.
(Credit: Secure World Foundation)"We promote the need for space governance," said Phil Smith, the Secure World Foundation's communications director, and help "establish effective systems of governance in outer space."
I visited the organization's headquarters--discreetly tucked away in a small house in a residential neighborhood here--as part of Road Trip 2009. I wanted to see what, if anything, people are doing to ensure that space isn't fully dominated--and contaminated--by any one or two countries.
Smith explained that the SWF breaks its definition of space governance into several different categories: international civil space situational awareness; mitigation of orbital debris; establishing systems for the efficient sharing of data from space-based remote sensing platforms; and working to prevent a space arms race.
While it may be easy to discount the efforts of a small organization based far from Washington, Brussels, Moscow, or Beijing, Smith said that the SWF's $1.5 million annual budget comes entirely from the philanthropy of a very-well connected family interested in promoting such issues.
Further he said, while its headquarters is in Superior, the SWF does maintain an office in Washington, as well as in Vienna, Austria, and makes its research and analysis known by working directly, with permanent observer status, with the United Nation's 69-member Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
The SWF doesn't have voting rights on the committee, Smith clarified, but does sit in on its meetings and provide advice when needed.
That means, Smith continued, the SWF has three main goals: facilitating meetings between various interested groups to hash out issues; advocating for space governance; and spreading the word of its analysis by, among other things, giving briefings on Capitol Hill, and to local and state governments because the issues it works on do impact the space industry, and officials may not always be aware of the various things going on at the international and domestic level.
But ultimately, while the SWF does share its opinions with Congress, its primary constituency is not the U.S. government, but rather the international community, Smith said.
Space traffic management
To the SWF, space situational awareness (SSA) is a significant component of space traffic management. Essentially, Smith said, it's a bit like air traffic control.
The U.S. Air Force, he said, does most of the tracking and watches about 19,000 objects four inches or larger orbiting Earth, most of which are satellites that are either still functional or dead. But the SWF considers tracking space weather an equally important part of the equation, Smith said.
For example, those with assets in space have a constant need to be aware of things such as whether the sun is sending off rare coronal mass ejections, a major event of solar flare activity, which can cause considerable amounts of damage to satellites.
Further, detecting such events would be crucial if there were astronauts in space, as they could be killed if they weren't quickly returned from orbit.
And to that end, the SWF is able to access and monitor data that comes from a satellite called Soho, which monitors the sun 24 hours a day, looking for just this kind of solar activity.
Ultimately, Smith said, space traffic management is kind of an umbrella discipline that comprises things like SSA and monitoring space weather and orbital debris. And because there is general agreement that space traffic management is broadly necessary, Smith added, it's not as controversial as, say, discussing management of space weapons.
Space weapons
The management of space weapons, however, is "typically a starting point for controversy," Smith said. This, mainly, is about the development of anti-satellite weapons.
There is some concern about whether a country's satellite launch vehicle might instead be geared to launching a missile, which is where Iran and North Korea are causing controversy, Smith argued. But the SWF's main focus is on anti-satellite weapons, which are typically space- or ground-based systems designed for the disabling of satellites.
And, Smith said, there are just three countries thought to already be capable of such weapons: the United States, China, and Russia. However, he added, anyone with a launch vehicle technically has the ability to target satellites, meaning that countries like Japan, Israel, India, and now Iran could be added to that list.
The idea is to stave off the development of space weapons. The United Nations' Conference on Disarmament is the main international organization looking at this, though Smith pointed out that there are today no known space weapons in orbit. But it's a definitional problem, he explained. At one time, the Soviet Union thought that the Space Shuttle was meant to be a space weapon that could, for example, orbit and grab satellites.
But today, the goal is to prevent the development of such weapons, and that is handled mainly by the Conference on Disarmament, Smith said. While the SWF is an observer at the U.N., it doesn't have such status with the Conference on Disarmament. Instead, the organization relies on its extensive roster of contacts and relationships to influence the space weapons discussion, Smith explained.
Orbital debris
Beyond the political problems anti-satellite weapons can create, the SWF is concerned about them because of their potential to create space debris. That's because a destroyed or dead satellite can wreak havoc on functional satellites.
"A small piece (of debris) can create an enormous amount of damage due to kinetic energy," he said.
Today, Smith said, there are voluntary guidelines that member nations adhere to when it comes to creating space debris. But the SWF is hoping to make those guidelines "more robust," he said. Of course, while it's impossible to do away entirely with space debris, everyone involved is hoping to stop it as much as possible.
The question is, how do you prevent the creation of debris? Do you forge a treaty, Smith said, or a strong, fundamental set of rules everyone agrees to abide by. But enforcement is a big problem, he added. It may, in the end, be about peer pressure. For example, he said that in 2007, China launched an anti-satellite weapon at one of its defunct satellites, destroying it and creating a great deal of debris in the process.
From China's perspective, the test proved that it had the technology--and once proved, it's not necessary to have to do it again--but the country also took a lot of flak from the international community for creating the massive amount of debris.
The big idea is to figure out how to best track space debris to provide data to satellite owners so that they can maneuver their assets around junk that might cause significant damage, and therefore additional debris. Still, with the amount of space activity growing, it is expected that space debris will increase over time, as well.
Planetary defense
Another main area of SWF's focus is on planetary defense, or the protection of Earth against asteroids, or comets, or other space junk that could appear out of nowhere, impact the planet and cause serious problems, up to and including massive species extinction.
The Association of Space Explorers, a group of former astronauts, is one group that is focusing on this issue, and has produced a report on how to deal with this issue at a policy level.
But again, the SWF gets involved at the international policy level, weighing in when asked by the U.N. about what to do with the astronauts' report. The idea is to prepare a plan so that if a hazardous space object is detected, we know what to do about it, rather than having to create a plan on the fly.
And that leads to a final area of the SWF's main focus: data sharing.
The SWF wants to ensure, Smith said, that everyone has access to data that can be collected by satellites about global vegetation growth, about the effects of global warming, as well as many of the issues discussed above.
While a small organization without major funding or direct involvement in any of the issues it studies, the SWF would seem to have limited power. But because it is consulted regularly by the United Nations and has contacts throughout the world, we can all hope that having a non-governmental nonprofit looking out for the fair use of space will help further that goal. After all, who else is going to argue for space?
While it may seem normal to have several Net-connected Macs among a small group of people, this is the first time such a scene happened at the off-the-grid, mountaintop home of CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman's in-laws.
NICE, Calif.--As a San Francisco-based Internet junkie, I can't count the number of times I've been in groups with almost as many wirelessly connected Mac laptops as people.
So the scene in front of me shouldn't be new: four people, three connected Mac laptops.
But there's something completely novel going on: I'm visiting my in-laws at their off-the-grid, mountaintop house in Northern California, about four hours northeast of San Francisco. And I can say with absolute certainty that this is the first time such a scene has played out here.
How do I know? Because it's been less than two weeks since my in-laws, Tyler and Donna, had Internet installed on their property for the first time--in their case, the only available option was satellite--and it's been just hours since I personally set up their wireless network. In other words, Wi-Fi is a newly arrived house guest, and judging by the concentration on their faces, the occasional smiles, and the superlatives coming from their lips, it's a very welcome one.
For years, my wife and I had been trying to get her parents to cotton to the idea that their lives, at 4,000 feet, surrounded by national forest and steeped in the necessities of growing most of their own food, could be improved by getting online. But they'd gotten by just fine, thank you, for more than 30 years, without even a television.
Now, suddenly, there is a Wi-Fi network set up in their house, and I could see my in-laws' lives changing before my eyes.
For example, Tyler said excitedly to me one morning during my visit that he'd figured out how to use e-mail and the Web to do many of the things that used to require him to stop at the post office and get stamps.
"That's the end of snail mail for me," Tyler told me. And, he added, no more catalogs would be cramming their P.O. box.
Yesssss!
Working so much better now
My wife and I had conveniently--and coincidentally--managed to time our last visit to the mountain with the HughesNet satellite installation. But as I wrote previously, those first baby steps didn't go so well.
Thanks to glacially slow initial download speeds, the unexpected realities of a 200MB daily download limit, and the necessity of loading countless Windows updates onto their 2-year-old, Internet-chaste PC, we had retreated the mountain almost embarrassed by how badly it had gone.
This is the screen HughesNet customers can use to get up-to-date information about their Internet connection.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)So, I set out to make it all better by bringing them a refurbished MacBook, pre-configured at home with everything they'd need for a happy Internet life. I even unhooked my home Wi-Fi network and donated it to the cause.
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CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman's in-laws live at the top of a mountain, are off the grid, and have missed the last 30-plus years of innovations in media. On Monday, they got satellite Internet installed. This is the view of their new dish from the deck of their mountain-side house.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)NICE, Calif.--This was truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Imagine getting to introduce to the Internet a couple of otherwise-normal 60-somethings who, having lived off the grid at 4,000 feet in the middle of national forest, have missed more than 30 years of media innovations.
That's what I did earlier this week, with my in-laws, Tyler and Donna. They're perfectly nice people. They just have never used the Internet before, haven't watched TV, really, and even their cell phone is turned off most of the time to conserve their limited solar power.
I've been coming to visit them for nine years, and there were countless conversations with them during which my wife and I, both Internet junkies, rhapsodized about its virtues. We gushed about Google. We raved about Second Life. We couldn't stop beating Wikipedia's drums.
We'd get weary nods and, "It sounds great, but we don't really have any use for the Internet."
For my wife and me, that was nothing but further motivation to get them online.
A couple of years ago, we replaced the ancient desktop computer on which they did their accounting with a new PC that we joked was the planet's healthiest Windows machine, having never been anywhere it could meet a virus.
We also began bringing them DVDs, and they fell hard for "The West Wing" and "The Wire." But it was my wife's masterstroke--getting them a Netflix subscription--that probably won them over.
They had no way to manage their Netflix account, so we did it for them. They'd get the movies at their P.O. box, 45 minutes away, watch them, return them on their next supply run, and repeat.
Two installers from HughesNet putting the finishing touches on the satellite dish.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Setting up their queue was beyond surreal. They'd seen nothing. Not "Goodfellas," not "Pulp Fiction," not "Gladiator," "The English Patient," "Traffic," or "Chariots of Fire." Hardly anything. Do you know anyone like that?
The last time we visited, Tyler asked me to find out how much power a satellite dish, a modem, and a wireless router used. He wasn't sure that their power system was up to the task.
It was, though, and last week, as we were getting ready for a visit, my wife said, "By the way, they're getting satellite Internet installed on Monday."
Our incredible toy
I'm a geek, so I don't mind telling you how eager I was to show off our incredible toy. Despite being avid readers, radio listeners, and now movie fans, my in-laws still had no idea that the world was coming to their door. On Monday.
Some friends visited the mountain with us, and they also got excited about introducing my in-laws to the Internet. Over the weekend, we made a list of Web sites everyone agreed they had to visit: Snopes.com, NYTimes.com, NPR.org, BBC.co.uk, Huffingtonpost.com, Google News, PostSecret, Craigslist, Flickr, BurningMan.com, Epicurious.com, TED.com, and others.
But on Saturday night, we asked them what they wanted to explore first. In my mind, it would be something fanciful. Maybe a site about science or history or politics.
"Oh, something about fava beans, I imagine," Tyler said.
On Monday, HughesNet sent two installers, and then, after nine years, it was game on.
In the in-laws' little office, where their PC lives, I sat down to work on getting the machine secured.
We're buying them a Mac, but for now, my eyes were on the prize: the latest Windows security updates. But the connection speed they were getting was painfully slow, around 13Kbps. Windows Service Pack 3 is more than 300 megabytes--more than eight hours of download time away. We had to leave long before that.
I decided to forgo SP3 and instead install AVG, a free antivirus package. But the connection was so slow that the download failed. Twice.
The screen on the computer of one of the HughesNet installers as the satellite Internet connection was being set up for the first time.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)I was embarrassed and frustrated. To diffuse the situation, we decided to turn the focus to picking a Gmail address. They suggested a series of what to any veteran Internet user were obviously unavailable names: Tyleranddonna, Donnaandtyler, Beautifulmountain. Using my MacBook Pro and an EV-DO card, we finally found something.
I also decided to download AVG on my Mac. That, too, was painfully slow--we were at 4,000 feet, far from town--but it worked, and I copied the AVG file to their PC via a thumb drive.
But AVG needed its own updates, and so it went looking for them. I noticed that the download speeds had slowed even further, now to less than 2Kbps.
Slowly but surely?
This was ridiculous. They had signed up for a 1.0Mbps connection, which, I read, promised downloads of more than 500Kbps. They were getting 1Kbps.
I called HughesNet, and a technician told me that the account had surpassed its "Fair Access" limit. It turns out that satellite Internet users get only so much bandwidth per day--in my in-laws' case, 200 megabytes. Go over the limit, you get dial-up speeds for 24 long hours.
The technician told me that there was nothing he could do about it, despite my insisting that there was no way they'd passed 200 megabytes. A supervisor confirmed that he had "no mechanism" to lift the limit for the day, even when I explained that I had to leave soon and that I absolutely needed to finish downloading the security patches before I drove off the mountain.
In the HughesNet pamphlet that had finally lured Tyler and Donna, a footnote I now discovered really concerned me: "Based on analysis of customer usage data, Hughes has established a download threshold for each of the HughesNet service plans that is well above the typical usage rates."
CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman's father-in-law sits at his computer, looking at his Internet connection for the very first time.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)This was alarming, as one of the things my wife and I were most excited about was the idea of her parents being able to . This vision now looked endangered.
"In order to arrive at our Fair Access Policy, Hughes conducted an analysis of HughesNet customer usage and then established a download threshold for each plan that was above average usage rates," Hughes wrote me in an e-mail Thursday. "Certain activities are more likely than others to exceed the daily download threshold, such as continuous downloading or viewing streaming-media content such as audio or video programming."
Users do get unlimited high-speed downloads from 2 a.m. to 7 a.m. EST. Long after the in-laws would be watching streaming movies.
This was not good. What worried me more was that even watching YouTube videos might quickly put them over the top. The Hughes e-mail, though, seemed to dismiss that worry: "Activities such as viewing Web sites, checking e-mail, watching short streaming-media presentations, i.e. YouTube, and automatic software and antivirus updates are not likely to exceed the download threshold."
Back on the mountain, I decided that, slow speeds be damned, I was getting them online before my wife and I departed.
So I pulled Tyler over to the PC and sat him down.
This would not be so simple. After all, he had no experience with a browser. He didn't know where to click, or how to enter a URL, or how to tab between fields. There's a huge learning curve here for my wife's folks. They need Internet for Dummies--and now.
We booted up Firefox--I had downloaded it for him, as I would never let Internet Explorer set foot in their house again--to head to Google (see the video below, which evolves slowly).
Starting with the basics
I showed him where to type, and a little while after he typed in "Google.com," he got his first look at the search engine's wonderful, spare home page.
It was a moment of truth: What would be the first thing he would look up? Would it be FDR? The Vietnam War? Barack Obama?
Nope. It was fava beans. He hadn't been kidding earlier.
Before we knew it, Tyler was on EveryNutrient.com, a good site, it seems, to learn about the nutritional value of fava beans.
After a little more browser 101--explaining that words in blue are usually hyperlinks, and how to use the back and reload buttons--we hopped over to Wikipedia. More fava beans.
But things went downhill when we tried Gmail so that Tyler could send his first-ever e-mail--can you remember when you did that? The site wouldn't load. The connection was simply too slow.
My wife and I had built this moment up so much in our minds over the years that we were clearly more excited than her parents. Yet Tyler was frustrated. And that was crushing.
Looking for a graceful way out, we adjourned from Gmail and moved into their living room to talk.
We asked them what they were looking forward to using the Internet for. And again, practicality won. Donna said she wanted to be able to get better fire information than she could on the radio, which makes sense, since they live in the middle of a forest.
I said there were always real-time maps online during fires.
"That's exactly what we want to know," she said.
Tyler added, "That'll be tremendously helpful."
They also said they were excited about investigating the various weather sites, since they are deeply subject to the whims of their environment. And, yes, they expect to spend a lot of time reading up on nutrition.
For my wife and me, it was time to leave. But I felt sheepish.
I had had such high hopes for this experience, and instead, it had been deeply disappointing. I couldn't even bring myself to ask what they had thought about their initial experiences on the Internet.
But it will get better. We'll go back soon to make sure.
Southwest Airlines announced Wednesday that it plans to begin trials of satellite-to-airplane broadband Internet service sometime this summer.
Spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said Wednesday morning that initially Southwest plans to test the service on four planes. But because the airline's planes fly many different routes, she did not anticipate--at least not yet--that travelers would be able to plan to fly on one of those planes.
Southwest Airlines plans to begin trials of satellite Internet service this summer.
(Credit: Southwest Airlines)That means that in the early going at least, the service--which will allow passengers to access the Internet if they have their own Wi-Fi-enabled laptops--will be available at random.
McInnis did not say if Southwest's service would limit what kind of sites or applications passengers could access, as does JetBlue's recently added service.
But she pointed out that because the service is satellite-to-plane--whereas JetBlue's, for example, is ground-to-air--it would ensure consistent connectivity, even over water.
It's not entirely clear what benchmarks Southwest will use to determine the success or failure of the trial. McInnis said that the airline will examine whether the technology works and whether it performs according to plan.
As a frequent Southwest traveler, I guess I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it would be great to have connectivity while on the go. On the other, as many have discussed previously, bringing Internet to the few places where it's not currently available limits the places you can get away from work.
Still, I suppose I'm in favor of the advance. Now if only airlines can work on bringing power outlets to all seats--not just those in business or first class--so that those of us in coach flying long flights can power up the whole way.
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