Musk to set up an internet connection on Mars?

Few days ago, Elon Musk answered questions in a forum regarding various topics in which he also teased about an idea of getting internet connection on Mars.

Musk participated in ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) forum on Reddit. While answering queries related to SpaceX’s latest rocket, a user presented an idea of providing internet connection on the Red Planet.

He asked, “Does SpaceX have any interest in putting more satellites in orbit around Mars (or even rockets) for internet/communications before we get feet on the ground? Or are the current 5-6 active ones we have there sufficient?”

To this Musk playfully responded, “If anyone wants to build a high bandwidth comm link to Mars, please do.”

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Shedding more light on it Musk further exclaimed, “But, yes, it would make sense to strip the headers out and do a UDP-style feed with extreme compression and a CRC check to confirm the packet is good, then do a batch resend of the CRC-failed packets. Something like that. Earth to Mars is over 22 light-minutes at max distance. 3 light-minutes at closest distance. So you could Snapchat, I suppose. If that’s a thing in the future.”

However, this is not the first time someone gave a thought of internet connection on other planets. Earlier in 2015, Musk also proposed to put hundreds of satellites 1,200 km above Earth in space in order to achieve this task.

While talking to Bloomberg back then, he said, “Our focus is on creating a global communications system that would be larger than anything that has been talked about to date.”

Concluding, it’s still not clear whether the idea of setting up internet on Mars is feasible or just a bizarre fantasy at this time. However, according to Futurism, a Reddit user commented regarding the potential of this idea: “The concept of an internet connection on Mars is kinda awesome. You could theoretically make an internet protocol that would mirror a subset of the internet near Mars. A user would need to queue up the parts of the internet they wanted available and the servers would sync the relevant data. There could be a standard format for pages to be Mars renderable since server-side communication is impractical.”