That would leave a tape residue. Bungies are probably the easiest method. Most good cameras have a tripod mount. So you can bring up a mounting adapter that can grab onto a hand-hold or other available hard point.

I'm sure companies like Google and Microsoft will set up Mastodon instances, and provide support services. They will want to mine the user data.

All those politicians he contributed to is the only thing I can imagine with enough clout to get a deal. You never get a deal to flip on a smaller fish.

When your own name screams "Bank-man Fraud", it is going to be hard to maintain a presumption of innocence.

The Conquest of Space is a 1949 book by Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley, which inspired a 1955 science fiction film of the same name. We haven't talked about things that way since most of the colonial empires were dismantled. Specifically the Antarctic Treaty of 1961 and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 ended the practice of grabbing territory by nations that abide by the rule of law. Russia and China haven't got aboard that idea yet.

Quantum computers have the potential to solve certain kinds of problems faster than regular computers. IBM is a computer company, so they are investing in quantum computer research. Sometimes research doesn't pay off, but you never make progress unless you try.

And then the angels start talking to you

> I hope she never loses her curiosity and perseverance!!

Not possible. NASA tracks those rovers constantly.

Looks like padding, or possibly camera bags. The structural frame of the Cupola can get pretty cold on the night part of the orbit, and they need lots of padding to stop body motion in zero-g. In the lower left I also see stitching and a bit of collar, so there may be a jacket too.

> On the other hand plant based feedstocks suck up a lot of land.

Seaweed. Already grown on a 35 million ton per year basis.

Cyanobacteria are much older than regular plants. At some point they were absorbed and became the chloroplasts of modern plant cells. At first cyanobacteria could not tolerate oxygen themselves, and what was disposed as a waste product was oxidized with iron, forming the "banded iron formations", a modern iron ore source. So there wasn't enough free oxygen to accumulate in the atmosphere.

Free-range bacteria don't fill all the ocean area they inhabit. Once the oxygen sinks like iron were full, and they were concentrated in plant cells that could tolerate oxygen, the oxygen production grew by a large amount, and significant build up could happen,

Based on what I have seen in study results, 6 months or whenever a new variant becomes dominant and a specific booster for it becomes available. Unfortunately COVID is rapidly mutating, and nobody seems to have developed a long-term vaccine yet.

I'm OK with that schedule. I'm used to getting a flu vaccine every fall, with a similar situation of different variants in circulation each year.

Solar farms on Earth actually use robots on tracks with soft brushes to clean the panels. They get used in dry and dusty areas. In areas with lots of water, they just get sprayed.

The Insight lander that just died is 1/10th the weight of a large modern communications satellite. Deep space missions have had incredibly tight weight margins. So anything optional tends to get left behind.

The SpaceX Starship is being designed to land 200-300 times bigger payloads on Mars than Insight, and 100-200 times heavier than Curiosity and Perseverance. So they could include optional stuff like cleaning devices. They will also have people, so a simple dust brush you use once a year to clean the solar panels may be all you need.

"Global Warming" is a thing, but it has been around as long as Earth has been a water planet. The average temperature across the Moon is -15C, and the Earth would be too but for water being a greenhouse gas. So the average temperature actually is +15C.

But the oceans are all water, and even much of the land has water as ice or soil moisture. So the atmosphere is saturated with water, and any excess falls out of the sky (rain, snow, fog, etc.)

The reason CO2 and other greenhouse gases are a problem is they are not saturated, and accumulating.

The thousands of SpaceX Starlink satellites cover about 40 acres. The Earth's cross section, the area available to capture sunlight, is around 32,000,000,000 acres. It is utterly trivial.

About 30-35% of sunlight is reflected back to space, mostly due to clouds, and doesn't warm the Earth. That is a much much bigger factor.

Note: you don't have to sign your posts if it is the same as your username. It already appears at the top of every post.

See my other comment in this chain. New space solar is 30% efficient, compared to 12% for the old Station arrays when new. That's why the new roll out arrays can be so much smaller.

30% vs 12% in the original arrays when they were new. That's why the new ones are so much smaller.

The Space Shuttle ran off fuel cells, which meant a limited time on orbit. They had a goal of 30 day science missions, so a project was started for a "Power Extension Package" that had fold-out solar arrays.

That never flew on the Shuttle, but when the Space Station project started in the 1980's, it was adapted for the Station's main solar arrays. State of the art at the time was 12% efficient silicon cells.

Current state of the art are Gallium Arsenide + two other layers to capture more of the solar spectrum. So new satellite arrays get ~30% efficiency. Multi-layer cells are mostly too expensive for ground use, but silicon has been constantly improving, to where panels on Earth can convert up to 20-22% of incoming sunlight today.

The Raleigh Criterion (1.22 lambda/D) is what sets the beam angle. Lambda is the wavelength, and D is the transmitter diameter. The larger the transmitter, the tighter the beam.

Since the beam spreads as a circle and travels in a straight line, the diameter grows with distance, and beam area grows as distance squared. Total beam energy is constant at any distance till you hit the atmosphere.

The beam intensity goes as the inverse square because the area goes as the square and the total energy is constant. So that is a derived value from the physics.

For a reasonable size satellite and ground antenna, therefore you want the highest reasonable frequency and the lowest reasonable orbit.

It isn't a niche in terms of energy flow. Green plants figured out how to extract solar energy, which is a more abundant source than chemical energy like that found in black smokers. The waste product of photosynthesis is oxygen. Once all the oxidizable minerals were used up, it accumulated. Critters then learned to use it as an energy source.

Terrestrial solar has the same first two steps (solar > electric). But satellites in space get 36% more solar energy per square meter because no atmospheric absorption, and 3-8 times the operating hours depending on location, because no night or weather.

So you are starting out with a big advantage. There are efficiency losses going to RF and back to electric, and then there is cost. Launching to space has been way too expensive to make this idea work.

Two military applications are forward bases, which get set up in random locations, and spy devices. Beams are steerable, so it can be aimed wherever a base ends up. Spy devices are low power, so you don't need massive space satellites to send enough.

Most bird deaths from microwave towers are from running into guy wires, not the beams.

Solar energy in space is 36% stronger than on the ground, and available 24 hours a day rather than 3-8 for locations on the ground. So a panel in space generates a lot more power, and on a predictable schedule.

The trick is to get that power down to a transmission line on Earth at a reasonable cost. The military is interested in this, because they have to bring power to field bases in random locations. Beams are steerable. The current method involves tanker trucks fueling generators at absurdly high cost.

It is hard to focus radio waves tightly from space. You need a big transmitter antenna, which only makes sense for high power levels.

The difficulty is in focusing a beam tightly enough for a small setup on the ground. A combination of small nuclear units (around 30kWe + 90 kW thermal each) and solar panels with dust brushes should do for small bases. Various rovers have run for several years without panel cleaning.