They can use capabilities put in place by other missions. The proposal calls for a network of Internets to facilitate communication among planets, satellites, asteroids, robotic spacecraft and crewed vehicles and create a stable interplanetary backbone network. Other parts of NASA have already begun experimenting with remote Internet communication, demonstrating last year that it could use standard Internet protocols to communicate with an orbiting spacecraft just like any other node on the Internet. Moreover, the organization of the network can change. Today, the quickest way to send a message to Mars would be directly, when Earth and Mars are close.
Space poses other problems as well.
Signals are more easily intercepted by others, making sturdy security a must, and data loss will be a routine occurrence, warns the draft. On the Internet, the transfer of data from server to server is accompanied by acknowledgements and error messages in real time. With long delays plaguing the communications, however, such messaging would just slow things down, stated the proposal. Such bundles of data will minimize the traffic between interplanetary Internet servers. Furthermore, a standards-based approach to interplanetary communications will allow NASA to reuse communications data from mission to mission.