CLEVELAND — Whether it’s a live stream of your kid's game or FaceTiming with family, streaming video is part of our everyday life. The boundaries of what's possible with streaming video continued to be pushed as NASA researchers in Cleveland just completed an experiment involving streaming 4K video to the International Space Station from an aircraft for the first time.
"Never happened before in human history," research pilot Mark Russell said. "Everything is digital now, and you have to figure out how the infrastructure is going to work."
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Streaming video has made quite some strides from it’s early beginnings, most notably when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon in 1969.
July 20, 1969, 10:56 pm ET: "That's one small step for man... One giant leap for mankind."
— National Air and Space Museum (@airandspace) July 21, 2024
Hundreds of millions of people tuned in around the world to watch the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. How NASA made it happen: https://t.co/bnQUG1hxef pic.twitter.com/hQLOuhfMME
Russell explained to News 5 that lasers are what makes this new development possible.
Rachel Dudukovich, lead engineer on the project, explained how the public could watch live video coverage of astronauts on the moon in high definition during the upcoming Artemis missions.
"Our goal is to build a solar system internet," she said. "This is going to allow astronauts to transmit data and have video conferencing back on Earth."
So, after streaming 4K video from this plane to the International Space Station, what's next? Experts explain the goal to stream 4K video to and from the Moon.
"We can take things not completely refined, flushed out, get them out in the field and stress test them," NASA researcher Daniel Raible said.
"As we get to the Moon and Mars, we have long range communications we have to solve," Russell explained. "You can’t wait minutes or a half hour for a signal to go back and forth for instructions. You need seconds and that's what laser communications is going to do."
