No more American manned spaceflights

[pmulcahy11b]

On a different but related track, a recent PCWorld report says that Internet speeds to Earth are only about the same as dial-up speeds here on Earth. That's something they're working on to speed up; It will be essential before you can have a large civilian presence in Earth orbit. The problem is that the ISS is moving, the Earth is moving, and the ISS constantly has to change tracking stations while it orbits. Those tracking stations weren't designed for Internet traffic.

Beyond Earth orbit, forget it. The time lag will be to great, even from high Earth orbit to the ground, to play games like Warcraft or something like that. And of course, civilians will be upset about that...

A Canadian astronaut has already tried to play Warcraft from the ISS on his day off and found out the slow internet connection stopped him from effectively doing that.