About the registry
A coordinated namespace for spacecraft and the in-between.
The Deep Space Network Info Center was chartered to address a specific coordination problem: as commercial constellations, lunar infrastructure programs, and interplanetary missions began deploying IP-addressable endpoints at scale, the existing terrestrial registry model — bound to geography and national jurisdictions — left no obvious home for assets that physically reside in orbit, on other bodies, or in transit between them.
DESNIC operates under its independent community charter covering 240.0.0.0/14 — a 262,144-address block within the IPv4 "reserved for future use" range, reallocated under community policy for space-based network endpoints. Member origin-AS assignments are drawn from the IANA-reserved 32-bit autonomous-system block AS65552–AS131071, allocated on a stride-16 basis to permit future sub-AS delegation within each member organization. The charter excludes terrestrial use; routing of DESNIC prefixes is coordinated with operator member networks via the dsn-irr database and RPKI ROAs. Operating capital is provided by Meridian Orbit Capital Partners III, L.P., a private-equity vehicle specializing in orbital and cislunar infrastructure; governance remains community-led and independent of investor direction per the 2024 recharter agreement. Our remit covers allocation, route-object publication, reverse-DNS delegation, and contact-of-record maintenance for spacecraft-and-segment IPv4 resources.
IPv4 allocation
Prefix delegations from /27 (single spacecraft bus) to /16 (full constellation), governed by the published needs-justification policy.
Route coordination
IRR objects, ROAs, and store-and-forward path advertisements for DTN-bearing prefixes via the dsn-irr database.
Contact registry
Authoritative NOC, abuse, and orbital-element contacts — queryable via whois/RDAP under the desnic schema.
Whois & RDAP lookup
Active allocations
| Prefix | Holder | ASN | Segment | Status |
|---|
Allocation policy
How space gets handed out.
Requests are evaluated against the three-factor needs assessment: (1) demonstrated technical infrastructure, (2) operational segment classification, and (3) 24-month utilization forecast with link-budget justification.
Minimum allocation size
/27 for single-spacecraft buses. /24 for clustered missions. /22 minimum for constellations with ≥48 active endpoints. Sub-/27 assignments are not portable.
Median request size 2025: /23
Segment classification
Orbital (LEO/MEO/GEO), Cislunar, Lunar Surface, Lagrangian, and Deep Space (heliocentric). Each carries distinct RTT-tolerance and reverse-DNS rules.
5 classes · 12 sub-classes
DTN binding requirement
Allocations to endpoints with one-way light-time > 4s must publish a corresponding Bundle Protocol endpoint identifier (ipn:NODE.SERVICE) per RFC 9171 within 30 days of activation.
98.2% compliance Q1 2026
End-of-mission reclamation
Prefixes are reclaimed 180 days after confirmed loss-of-signal or disposal-orbit insertion. A 24-month quarantine prevents reassignment to prevent stale-route conflicts.
Quarantine pool: 5.2M addresses
Relevant standards
Orbital tracking & range telemetry
Real-time situational awareness for registered space-network assets.
The Operations Center maintains continuous track on registered DESNIC member spacecraft using a federated feed from partner radar networks. The polar display renders azimuth–elevation–range in real time; the equirectangular ground-track panel projects current sub-satellite points; the Doppler waterfall shows received frequency offset across the L-, S-, X-, and Ka-band downlink channels. Orbital elements are propagated forward using the SGP4 model at 12 Hz update rate against the registry's authoritative TLE catalogue. The display operates in dual mode: near targets (LEO/MEO/GEO/lower-cislunar, ≤ 50,000 km) are tracked via active pulse ranging — outbound red wavefronts radiating from the station and inbound blue returns contracting back — while deep-space members (lunar relays, Lagrangian observatories, interplanetary probes) are tracked via continuous coherent transponder ranging on the spacecraft's own downlink carrier, rendered as steady bearing locks with pulsing terminators. The inter-satellite-link mesh overlay draws active Bundle-Protocol-over-IPv4 paths between member spacecraft as line-of-sight permits, animating live packet flow with payload classification and source/destination prefix annotation. The Moon is included as a registered relay anchor; other planetary bodies are reported separately by the JPL HORIZONS feed.
Range telemetry 12 Hz
Current TLE · primary —
Routing table (BGP / DTN) —
| PREFIX | VIA | HOPS | METRIC |
|---|
Track list —
| ID | EL° | RNG km | SNR | STATE |
|---|
PULSE RANGING IS RENDER-INTENSIVE · 70 BIRDS + LUNAR NODE + MESH · CONSUMES ~1 CORE + 120MB · THROTTLE VIA /api/v1/track/throttle
Operator console
Air-to-ground voice loop
Continuous transcription of the DESNIC-OPS-1 operations voice loop — controller calls to member network NOCs, deep-space station acquisition/handover traffic, ranging passes, and incident coordination. Loop 7 is the unclassified ground-coordination channel; spacecraft command traffic is carried separately and not transcribed here. Speech-to-text is automated; callsigns are normalized against the registry contact-of-record database.
Notices & advisories
Operational and security notices.
Active incidents, scheduled maintenance, and policy bulletins are posted here as the registry's authoritative public record. Subscribe via the announce-only mailing list notices@desnic.net or the RSS feed at desnic.net/notices/feed.xml.