That works for awhile, but eventually the fine dust sticks and starts to accumulate. Then, the only way to get it off requires physical contact. (usually washing, even with a water spray - which can also be done with drones

I've seen some panel designs that include automatic washers, though I don't know if that ends up better or worse than drone maintenance. (or just plain people rotating through them with a squeegee)

AC is always used for transmission lines because you can't step DC up or down with a transformer. Maybe someday we'll have better tech for that but for now we're stuck with AC whether we like it or not. The losses due to high current (at lower voltages) are just a complete showstopper otherwise.

Billions of acres of desert land in the west, sounds like an ideal place for solar. And can just crank it up to 115kv and send it anywhere on the US grid. Except for most of Texas of course, because they love their independence.

You have to consider varying degrees of care, and therefore expense. This isn't the 60's, we don't have two superpowers in a dick-measuring contest with unlimited budgets to spend.

The sky's the limit with the stuff they COULD do. But nowadays they get a budget, which is a number mostly drawn out of a hat based on what the funders WANT to spend on the project. Then it's up to the engineers to spend that money as carefully as possible, to get the best results possible. The funders are likely given a bottom number, and a table of "if you spend X, there's an A percent chance of success. Or if you spend Y, that raises the odds to B. So the funders balance the chance of success they want with the money they want to spend, and a budget is born. "this is what you have to work with."

I was wondering if the people generating these cost-to-success tables are making bad assumptions based on prior successes like Appolo missions. (where NASA basically got a blank check, and a "do it as good as you can, as quickly as possible") Naturally with a bottomless budget they were able to recruit all the best talent, do all the expensive studies and research, build using the best most expensive materials available, AND weight restrictions were bound by technical abilities rather than cost.

But you can't base practical space missions today using those numbers because they are unbounded. It requires doing some extrapolation downward since money matters now. Just because Appolo "made it look easy" doesn't mean it WAS easy. They were just willing to pay dearly for that high rate of success. And I wonder if today's engineers aren't giving "the power of wheelbarrows of cash" enough credit - cutting corners, using cheaper / less proven methods, etc, without really realizing just how much that's going to affect the chances of success.

or it bounced/rolled and just ended up that way.

The moon seems to be doing very well at jamming probes we send to it. Makes me wonder if people designing and programming these landers are just not being as careful with them as say, a mission to Mars, thinking "it's just the moon, it won't be as big of a problem!"

SPACE is hard. ALL space is hard.

There needs to be a law on the books that requires any company requiring "online activation" or "always-online" for single-player-capable games to maintain an update in escrow somewhere for the day that the company closes its doors (or shuts down its servers) that can be released to the public to remove that limit and allow the game (or any such software really) to continue to function.

The problem we have right now is the consumer has paid for their software but is ultimately limited to the lifetime of the publisher. The handy thing for the publisher though is the consumer has no legal remedy against them when they go out of business. So long and thanks for all the fish!

Of course the same thing happens when activation servers are voluntarily shut down by a publisher. But at least in that case there's still a company to sue or launch a class-action against.

for anything you want to do with offshore wind or wave power. The power looks very attractive until you see all the damage the salt water can do in a short period of time.

Like they're trying to argue that they want a search warrant to find the EVIDENCE they need to prove a crime. But the judge is saying you need to HAVE some sort of evidence to GET the search warrant, to go looking for ADDITIONAL evidence that it's reasonable to assume exists.

Sounds like an argument against the 4th amendment: "If you've done nothing wrong, got nothing to hide, then you won't mind us searching?"

Small nuclear batteries are great for long term energy, but they produce so little power. The most practical use for them is in places you will NEVER be able to replace the battery, like in space probes, where energy demands are low and heat isn't too big of a problem. (or in some cases, a useful by-product) TEGs are just so ridiculously inefficient, and there really hasn't been any breakthroughs in TEG design in decades.

Burning fossil fuels (be they coal or natural gas) are just generating power from natural energy reserves accumulated over time. Things like solar, wind, and geothermal are all generating power from smaller amounts of energy that are spontaneously available. That's what makes them lower power density and intermittent - they lack storage.

So adding these battery banks is really helping to fill in the missing part of the system, since you can't just fill a giant tank with pressurized sunlight, or keep a big pile of wind behind the building. Similar to the lower production density of solar and wind, the energy density of batteries is also less than that of fossil fuels. Renewable energy is less power-dense in both production AND storage. It's just a necessary tradeoff of renewable energy - you're not spending down limited natural reserves that have been accumulating for several millennia. So we need to keep looking for space to put these facilities. This isn't a problem that's going to go away if we choose to ignore it.

And we need to stop looking at fossil fuels as a source of energy. In the long term, they're really only a stop-gap for us to run off for a limited time while we get our renewables set up and optimized. It's basically a race for us to try to get our renewables going before we run so low on fossil fuels that they become more expensive than the renewals. The average person doesn't really see this at the wall plug, but it's already becoming a lot more noticeable at the gas pump. It's absurd to be questioning whether or not we should be switching to renewable energy. It's not a choice, it's a necessity, and the longer we drag our feet with it the more painful it's going to be.

When space experts are asked to compare mars to other places like earth or the moon, they usually refer to mars as a bigger problem. "It has just enough atmosphere to be a problem. There's enough of it that you have to deal with atmospheric heating on entry, but there's not enough of it to make soft landings easy".

With earth you can use the atmosphere to brake into orbit which requires a heat shield and can be tricky, but then you just pop a chute and land softly. On the moon you don't need a heat shield, but you need a powered descent. (although the gravity is much weaker so you need far less propellant than you would on earth)

Mars is a much bigger challenge than either the earth or moon, because it's two big challenges instead of one or the other. (yet we seem to be able to pull it off about 75% of the time)

Though that's for landing. Takeoff is a different story. Earth's strong gravity and thick atmosphere are a double challenge for getting into orbit. Mars has fairly strong gravity, but next to no atmosphere, so by the time you get moving, atmospheric drag doesn't matter anymore. The moon is a cake-walk, just one good blast and you're in orbit.

We've had a pretty good track record recently with Mars, I don't see why everyone seems to keep having problems with the moon missions lately.

The only lander that seems to have had any success recently is from China, and unfortunately they're one of those states that will only share positive things and hides any failures they can, so it's difficult to even tell just how well or poorly that one's doing.

this seems like something that's right up the alley of NFT and bitcoin mining. There's certainly a market for proof of authenticity, and blockchain was basically designed around that, although for a different purpose.

I wonder, with an ego that big, how did he manage to squeeze out the back stage door?

It feels more to me like "the general public wants this to be illegal, but my generous donors want to keep doing it, so we'll just pass laws that make it LOOK illegal, so the public thinks I'm doing my job", and "all the while they can keep doing it as long as they pay a small fine and I'll keep receiving my legal bribes". It's a win-win for the politicians and corporations. And the public loses.