What is Space Braiding?

Beyond Low Earth Orbit all communication between crew and ground is affected by time delay (latency), caused by the great distance and the finite speed of light and radio waves. The delay is unavoidable. It applies to all communication throughout all future deep space (lunar and beyond) missions.

Latency is expected to have significant impacts on future missions. Operationally time delay will impact on effective communication between crew and ground.⁽¹⁾ The impact on crew health may be even more significant as, without mitigation, crew will be emotionally isolated from their loved ones on Earth which is likely to have significant psychological and physiological impacts.

Space Braiding is the first tool designed to mitigate the impact of latency. It does not remove or reduce latency – that would break the laws of physics – but instead it disguises latency. Space Braiding can make two people separated by millions of kilometres feel as if they are having a natural, synchronous dialogue.

Space Braiding is patented and has been tested in studies funded by the UK Space Agency, the European Space Agency⁽²⁾ and NASA⁽³⁾ in collaboration with several academic partners including University College, London and Georgia Tech, USA. All results so far are positive – the preliminary data indicates that Space Braiding works.

Robust scientific studies of Space Braiding need a control condition. We built two, time delayed messaging and time delayed voice. If you have a plan to study high latency communications and would like to licence Space Braiding and/or the time delayed voice and messaging tools please get in touch.

Space Braiding – An introduction

⁽¹⁾ The Impact of Communication Delay and Medium on Team Performance and Communication in Distributed Teams

⁽²⁾ Enabling effective communication for human space exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit

⁽³⁾ Braiding – A novel approach to supporting space/ground communication under signal latency