Future space missions will benefit from an evolvable communication infrastructure, which can be built cost effectively over a period of time. This evolvable infrastructure needs to include two way high data rate transfers to support human exploration missions, and asymmetric high data rate links to support scientific missions. For this communication infrastructure to be effective, it needs to be designed on an architecture that has common standards and interfaces. The Internet Protocol (IP) provides such an architecture and has the benefit of interoperability with the terrestrial Internet. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a network emulator that would be capable of testing future deep space communication architectures. This design presented is flexible and lightweight, allowing missions such as communication with a rover on Mars, human exploration missions, Earth observing senor webs, and many more scenarios. Along with the vast scenario capabilities, newly developed protocols and modifications to existing protocols can easily be tested and evaluated within the network emulator. We have tested and shown the emulator's ability to apply arbitrary bit error rates and delays on packets traversing the network.

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