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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 07/07/03 issue

NASA Central

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

The agency brings a galaxy of Web sites into the fold

On Jan. 31, a server in the basement of NASA headquarters in Washington operated the NASA.gov Web site with a single shared T1 connection to the Internet.

At 11:45 p.m. Eastern time that night, all the traffic cut over to a brand-new portal hosted in an AT&T Corp. data center.

“I remember it well,” NASA spokesman Brian Dunbar. “The next day was when we lost the Columbia.”

Within 20 minutes of the space shuttle Columbia’s breakup during re-entry, traffic to NASA.gov spiked from 2 Mbps to 175 Mbps.

“You can’t really call anything connected with that day a success,” Dunbar said, but “people were able to get to the updates we were putting out on the Web.”

The high-bandwidth data center connection plus thousands of pages cached across AT&T’s network kept information available to the public as well as news media.

Last redesigned in 1997, NASA.gov’s presentation had been limited by the browsers of the time. Meanwhile, the site had evolved into a decentralized collection of pages.

“We had about 3,000 sites in the domain and about 4 million pages,” Dunbar said. “There was no guarantee that from any NASA Web page you could get to any other page.”

Nor was there any central content management. During the last Hubble space telescope service mission, sites hosted by the Johnson, Goddard and Kennedy space centers and a research center all focused on different aspects of the mission.

“At one time we had three different launch dates listed,” Dunbar said.

To bring order to the web of sites and take advantage of higher bandwidth and modern browsers, NASA in September issued a request for proposals for a new portal. Four finalists received $100,000 each to refine their proposals.

Done in phases

At the turn of the year, NASA contracted with eTouch Systems Corp. of Fremont, Calif., to oversee development and hosting of the new site and to provide content management.