So we’ve covered some widely spread institutions in the way of hospitals, restuarants and hotels in the last few volumes of “MeshBox Use Cases”. These are places that make up a part of virtually every community on earth within range of a city-center. But what about when you’re so far off the beaten track that you’re in… orbit?
The 20th Century saw the first unmanned and manned missions to breach the stratosphere and enter outer space. Now in the first quarter of the 21st, we’re at least “moving in” to the immediate areas between the ozone layer and the moon. Rockets are launching, satellites are being deployed, and the international space station has a permanent perch in the inner reaches of outer space.
All this activity requires a lot of coordination on the part of the technology involved, which reflects the diligence of the engineers who designed it. Having a manned space station, small, or in the future perhaps more like a colony, requires sophisticated communications and infrastructure. This said, MeshBox would be as at home in a space station as a frog in a swamp.
Running on only 70Kw of electricity it can be solar powered, provide wifi, bluetooth, LoRa and other connectivity options for all devices, human-held or IoT, and of course, keep things on the blockchain in an immutable record. Being able to manage transactive energy equations could allow humans on earth, other satellites, or any connected device to control energy sources and power things up and down… and it would be real hard to hack.
Its tempting to think of astronauts on a spacewalk completing an “off-chain/offline” Photon coin swap, which probably wouldn’t be necessary (but who knows!). But it is very likely that a piece of deployed equipment might need to liase with another one, both of which are offline and off-chain, and could make an exchange, trading data through tokenization, before returning to the base.
MeshBox could be the primary infrastructure hardware for a space station, a cluster of stations, or travelling spacecraft for that matter. The hockey legend Wayne Gretzky famously said, “I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it’s going to be.” MeshBox functionality is following the same trajectory, and ready to power up the last frontier with a decentralized network for communications, energy and IoT infrastructure.