In a move to boost crew morale, NASA has set up a high-speed wireless connection to provide Internet access to the International Space Station. It’s a decision the space agency has quickly come to regret. The broadband service, which was switched on last Friday, has dramatically curtailed productivity on board the orbiting space station, with its occupants spending an inordinate amount of time surfing the web, checking email, blogging and downloading files (or uploading, as the case may be).

Now NASA has a big problem: what to do to get the flight crew and scientists aboard to quit goofing off and get back to work.

“This has blown completely out of proportion to our original intent. It was supposed to be just for checking email and an occasional football score,” claimed a NASA network administrator from his office in Houston. “I warned NASA brass that this would happen, but did they listen? Now we have people up there spending all day on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.”

Online use aboard the station has escalated out of control, with activities on the 280-mile-high Internet cafe going well beyond social networking and eBay. Now NASA is threatening to pull the plug.

“Somebody up there - and we know who it is - has already downloaded twenty-six gigabytes of porn, a shitload of movies off Bit Torrent, and who knows how much music,” lamented a NASA staffer. “Just what the hell those people are doing up there is a mystery to us. They’ve maintained radio silence all week and haven’t performed a single experiment or maintenance operation since Sunday afternoon. I think we’ve created a monster.”

News of the high-flying Internet adventures have spread throughout the media, with Twitter reports being republished on news sites and blogs around the world. Not everyone is amused, with an outraged Congress considering slashing NASA’s budget, and even the RIAA getting into the fray, threatening to sue the astronauts if they don’t stop sharing files.

“If those guys up there think that copyright laws don’t apply in outer space, they are sadly mistaken,” warned Cary Sherman, president of the recording industry group. “We have their IP address.”