Time to think bigger than Earth, says father of the Net

NASA scientists want to expand cyberspace to outer space, going beyond the Internet site that many people around the world visited last year to follow the Mars Pathfinder's rover on the Red Planet, according to Mr Vinton Cerf, the man widely regarded as a "father" of the Internet. "The time is now to think beyond the Earth," Mr Cerf told INET '98, the annual meeting of the global Internet Society on Wednesday. "There is now an effort under way to design and build an interplanetary Internet."

The new system would directly link future astronauts in space with the Internet. Right now, NASA collects data by radio transmissions, then publishes information on the Internet. Cerf, a senior vice-president for MCI Communications, said he and other Internet experts have been working on the project with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory since last November. "This is quite real," Cerf said. "The effort is becoming extraordinarily concrete over the next few months because the next Mars mission is in the planning stages now."