The truly amazing thing about the orbiters around Mars is that they're all setup to use the same radio configurations, frequencies, protocols, etc. Any rover can bounce a signal off most any (US and Euro, not sure about Indian or Russian) orbiters. Yes, you have to wait for one to come over the horizon and be reachable; having more of them out there will increase the coverage. But ... rovers don't have to communicate direct to Earth and Euro landers don't have to wait for Euro orbiters to come over the horizon. Relaying the signal off ANY orbiter greatly reduces the mass (antennas, transmitters, amplifiers), volume and power requirements for the lander / rover. So you can have relatively small rovers, with relatively small / light power supplies, yet still have more connectivity back to Earth.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what infrastructure looks like. Instead of one-and-done, siloed missions.

If you look at this document, you will see that the Viking Orbiters had a 1.5 meter dish antenna and could communicate back to Earth at up to 16 kbit / sec. The lander had a 30 inch dish (approximately 1/2 the diameter); I'm not seeing anything about the rate at which it could communicate. It had to use this for control signalling from Earth, but it could use an omnidirectional UHF antenna to relay collected science data off the orbiter.

2 Mbits / sec, relayed through orbiters today is a pretty impressive bump, considering the distances involved.

First, get it working.

Second, confirm that it works correctly.

Third, polish and optimize.

With the Starship, they're still working on the first step.

The fact that previously-flown Falcon 9 boosters tend to be rather sooty (from flying back down through their exhaust plume) means they're really not THAT fussy about the third step. But it's hard to argue that they've got the first and second steps nailed down pretty well with the Falcon 9. Given enough time, I expect the Starship will get there. The only question is whether or not they will run out of money before that happens. Or get someone killed; that would also put the brakes on things. The fact that they've basically bought out Boca Chica and they keep landing the wreckage on the SpaceX logo ("At least the crater was in the right place!") means they're taking plenty of steps to reduce the probability of the latter.

While I am of the opinion that you can never have too many screens or too much screen real estate ... you'd be so distracted going from screen-to-screen on that thing, looking for whatever it is you need at the moment, you'd never hit a flow state and you'd never be very productive.

Does anyone else remember the three-screen, fold-up, touchscreen system they had on "F/X the Series?" I'd rather have one of those.

But ... what you're talking about is basically The Green New Deal.

And muh preferred talking heads are all saying The Green New Deal is ridiculous. That it's part of a plot by George Soros and the baby-eating, Satanist cabal to take over our country.

So I'm going to oppose that forever and ever, amen. I'll even get out some of my gun collection and drive my pollution-spewing 1970's half-ton Chevy to some event to protest it. And, of course, go brag about on SocMed while I'm at it.

While it's development board, it does have a GPIO header. So a lot of what you can do with a RasPi can be done with this, too.

Plus the fact that the RasPi doesn't have the computer vision accelerator. Or the Neural Net accelerator. Or the Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator. A RasPi has to do all of those things in software.

So, if you're doing something with a RasPi which entails computer vision or some kind of neural-net-based AI, you might want to spend the extra money for one of these.

I seem to recall that people who shorted Tesla, in 2020, lost over $20 billion.

That's with a "b." As in Big Bucks.

I don't know that I want to bet on Musk; his predictions have a knack of taking a lot longer, than expected, to come true. But I'm not stupid enough to bet against him.

None of his ideas, in their basic form, are that inventive. Low-pressure tube-based travel was a sci-fi fixture, as were tunnels under major cities, re-usable rockets and electric vehicles. But the execution of those ideas ... those tend to be rather inventive.

The Tesla S, being able to blow the doors of pretty much internal-combustion-powered vehicle ... impressive.

The launch of the Falcon Heavy, where the side boosters came down and "stuck the landing" in formation ... impressive, IMHO.

Was I the only person who watched the SN8 test flight, where it did the belly-flop move, and went "whoa??!" If you designed the passenger cabin and seating to handle that, you could have a rocket enter that way and right itself before landing upright and the passengers would walk away without a bump or bruise. But ... who else was even talking about that?

He decided, early on, that mankind needed to escape its cradle (Earth). He's been focusing on various ways to execute that.

Can't get to Mars without building some Big ... Friggin' ... Rockets. That takes money. That takes expertise on building rockets. SpaceX for the latter and StarLink for the former.

Will also need high-speed data connectivity when we get to Mars, without needing to blanket the landscape with wires / fiber optic cables / cellular towers. StarLink for that, too. If the satellites can also provide something akin to GPS ... icing on the cake. They've not talked about this but I bet StarLink could do that, down the road, when they have mobile ground stations. The tech isn't developed / polished enough for that, just yet.

Going to need electric propulsion when we get to Mars, as there are no chemical fuels there and the atmosphere is sufficiently low on oxygen that, even if you had such fuels, it wouldn't work. That takes proficiency with making electric-powered vehicles. Tesla for that.

Since Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere to protect you from meteorites or radiation, you will need to spend a lot of your time underground. Need proficiency with building tunnels. Boring Company for that.

Want to be able to travel, long distance, across Mars without needing to tunnel all the way and without needing large numbers of personal, all-terrain vehicles. HyperLoop for that.

If you know what you're looking for, everything he's doing is pointing the way to colonizing Mars. Not in the style of "The Martian;" closer to "Red Mars," although he could probably list one or more books which more closely match his vision of that. All of these technologies need to be fully developed and rather polished before he can create the kind of long-term infrastructure needed to support long-term human habitation on Mars. So he's busy developing and polishing them.

And profiting from them in the meantime. And shaking things up, disrupting existing incumbent technologies and companies, while he's at it.

Not going to worship him but I can appreciate his vision.

Alan Kay also plays the organ, and has one in his home. One of his projects at Xerox PARC was modding an Alto such that it could serve as a sampler. Pretty sure it ran about 12 kSamples / sec and could handle a musical keyboard input, but it quickly maxed out what the CPU could do.

As a general rule, getting into higher math, and into coding, requires being able to use symbology OTHER THAN that used in human-language reading and reading comprehension. Reading music also requires that. Ergo, someone who is adept at handling non-word symbology in music also tends to be adept at using non-word symbology for math or coding.

Yes, my coding uses a lot of words. There are nouns (objects), pronouns (variables, referring to objects) and verbs (functions / method / operators). There are sentences (expressions) which are harder to read and parse if they run on too long. There is a very definite, aesthetic boundary between code and "beautiful" code. There are parallels between writing in a human language and writing in a computer language. But ... there's also a lot of difference. Being good at one doesn't make one good at the other.

As I age, though, and my coding skills push beyond intermediate into more complex areas, my English-language writing tends to do the same. I spend a lot of time doc'ing stuff on the corporate wiki, partly so that I can refer back to it later and partly so that others can refer to it.

I played flute and trumpet when I was younger. I had piano lessons, but I didn't stick with them long enough to develop any real skill in that area. But yeah, I have some musical skills.

Hydrogen burns with an invisible flame. Even on film. What you're seeing burning on the Hindenburg was the "dopant" on the fabric skin, intended to make it weather-proof. It used a compound commonly found in solid-propellant rocket fuel (it wasn't rocket fuel but the major compound in it is also used in rocket fuel and is quite flammable). It burns with a very visible flame and no small amount of smoke. In the aftermath of the Hindenburg disaster, the Zeppelin company took all dirigibles out of service, found a dopant which was non-flammable and re-skinned all of them with the new dopant.

A NASA engineer wrote a chapter for a safety textbook on the subject.

Yes, hydrogen is considerably lighter than air; it is, quite literally, the lightest element on the periodic table. But it's also considerably more volatile than natural gas. So while it will rise, if there are any sparks, anywhere, there's a greater probability of it igniting.

Most tunnels have positive pressure evacuation systems, to push exhaust gasses, etc. out of the tunnel. They are usually driven by large, electric fans. Such tunnels don't allow Compressed Natural Gas or Liquid Natural Gas vehicles because, in the event of a spill or severe leak, the ventilation system can't get it out the tunnel fast enough for safety purposes. If they won't let you take a CNG or LNG vehicle in there, they won't let you take a hydrogen vehicle in there, for the same reason.

As to price: most hydrogen is made from reformed natural gas; that keeps the price reasonable. Yes, you can make it through electrolysis but a 50%-efficient hydrolyzer will need 72 kWh to make 1 kg of hydrogen (approx. the same energy content as a gallon of gasoline). At 10.5 / kWh (the average price for residential electricity in this country), that works out to 72 × 0.105 = $7.56 per kg. Even if you can manage to source the power for half that, you're still over $3.78 per kg. Is anyone paying that much for a gallon of gasoline, these days? I'm not. So, on simple economics, electrolysis loses in the market. You will be using hydrogen made from reformed natural gas. You might as well just use the natural gas, with a gasoline engine (much cheaper than a fuel cell) and get more energy in the same pressure tank (seeing has how H2 is considerably lighter than CH4, the same tank at the same pressure holds much more energy when filled with CH4).

And a James Bond Movie.

A couple years ago, I paid a visit to the National Cryptologic Museum near Washington, DC. They had a pair of 3-rotor Enigmas setup, powered up, etc. so you could play with them.

The 4-rotor variety ... yeah, those were rare. And they were in wide use at the end of WW II. Ergo, I'd guess that what they found was a 4-rotor, considering the late stage in the war and the comments about how rare it is.

In 1957, the Soviet Union put Sputnik in orbit.

And scared the bejeezus out of the USA.

Arecibo was partially funded for its ability to track stuff in Earth orbit, such as artificial satellites and potential ICBM warheads. Not that it ever got used for that (that I'm aware of, anyway). But, as others have noted, it could provide very accurate size measurements of things at great distance. What size of object could it track in LEO?

The USA pumped a ton of money into anything STEM-related, back then, because there was a very palpable fear that we were behind the Soviets in the technology race. Once Neal Armstrong did some moon-walking, we backed off pretty quickly.

PLATO got off the ground, due in no small part to its promise to help revolutionize and "scale up" STEM education across the country.

"What do the majority of these states have in common?"

A northern latitude, where there is less sunlight with each passing day. Which means less natural Vitamin D and more staying indoors / less outdoors.

Wisconsin and Minnesota all went blue this time. So it's not the politics.

Their process needs heat. Yes, you could use electricity to make heat. Teslas don't need heat.

Germany already has large numbers of systems in place for making natural gas from CO2, water and electricity. These run when their intermittent, renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, are producing more power than the grid demands. It's how they "soak up the excess" during such periods without wasting it.

Yes, batteries could eat the excess, release it later. Batteries are big and expensive and there are existing demands for such fuels, from existing vehicles and processes.

They also make diesel fuel, using Fischer-Tropsch processes to make the longer-chain hydrocarbons, using similar processes. Again, they're soaking up the excess from the renewable sources.

This fuel could be reprocessed in the same fashion. If the process is at least as efficient as the gas-producing systems, it might be a better deal because you could avoid putting in a pipeline to bring in gas. And you would have the heat you need during times when the grid would, otherwise, have too much demand, not enough supply.

I'm still looking for numbers on total efficiency of the gas vs iron powder.

Pretty sure Loon has been providing emergency coverage in many areas where the traditional infrastructure is either damaged (natural disaster) or non-existent. As such, I don't know that they're even planning on subscription service (as with StarLink). They've talked about it in the past but ... it's kinda hard to predict quite where the balloon will go (the winds aloft are still not that predictable). The only way to maneuver is to move up / down and try to get into winds that go the direction you want.

SpaceX has been working on the hard part of putting stuff in orbit. Once stuff hits orbits ... the predictability is pretty good. We've been getting good at predicting orbital movement since the 60's. And considering the fact that GPS relies on satellites in VERY predictable orbits, I'd say we've got that down.

Make no mistake: getting stuff into orbit is hard. SpaceX still hasn't gotten it down (as evidenced by various delays in launching stuff, lately) but they're doing very well. Musk stated that parachutes were harder than anyone expected. I expect controlling high-altitudes balloons is even harder.

So, M$ is going to setup some containerized data centers at StarLink ground stations, so that people using StarLink (private customers, commercial customers, government customers, etc.) will have minimal-latency access to Azure services.

There's more to it, but that's the basic premise. They believe (and not without reason) that StarLink is going to become a major player and they want to be positioned (literally and figuratively) to provide the fastest-possible access through same to their services.

Not the worst idea out there.

At first, it sounded like they were going to put Azure data centers in orbit, such that StarLink wouldn't even have to hit a ground station to hit them. Didn't seem like a good idea, as such systems would be hideously expensive to put up there. That is NOT what this is.