GREENBELT, MD - With a Star Trek-like tilt, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is taking the Internet where no one has gone before.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center here successfully communicated last year from a ground station to an orbiting spacecraft via the Internet. Its Operating Missions as Nodes on the Internet (OMNI) project made the craft an active node on the Net and gave it its own floating address.

PC Magazine called this “a truly far-out idea” and labeled it a trend to watch.