Wow, stop giving them a hard time… the fact that there’s disagreement here demonstrates the ambiguousness, he’s just right.

Wow, that is technically impressive, very cool!

How many full seeds are there? I mean how many could there be? Who has 300 Tb to throw at this?

For sure, and that can definitely work. But, you will need three times the number of solar panels (since half the time the panels are doing nothing and if you’re storing a lot of energy, that means there’s a proportional amount of storage losses.)

And I honestly don’t know how much mass in batteries would be needed for 15 days worth of storage, but my instincts say too much.

Keep in mind that total mass to deliver can sometimes be a biggest cost limitation. A nuclear generator that gets delivered in one launch could be cheaper than otherwise much simpler solar panels and batteries if that solution requires two or three launches.

Yeah, theoretically if your positioning is perfect you can get that eternal twilight, where the sun just travels across the horizon in a circle. But you know the moon wobbles a bit, so while you might get a month or two of straight sun, you might get a month or two of straight darkness, where the sun is just below the horizon, just barely out of reach…

Yes? Your point is?

So what stops people from walking into the bathroom, lighting up, and laughing at the honest poopers now perfectly visable?

Oh good, we’ll boycott food production, banking, technology, firearms and transportation.

Cool.

I’ll just sit here then. Let me know when the revolution is over.

You are talking individuals and small groups. And it’s great that there is at least some resistance.
But the American population seen as a whole isn’t doing anything. There are no massive demonstration outside the White House, ICE isn’t blocked except in a few places.

Why aren’t humans as a whole doing something about this? Why won’t the human race just do something!

This is kinda on you btw.

Well the sun works great for orbit around the moon, but on the surface a day/night cycle lasts a month. So that’s about 15 days of night at a time.

Obviously there’s no wind on the moon and burning things makes no sense. So literally the only options left are nuclear or lots and lots of batteries.

But then you build a much bigger one on earth. New nuclear power plants are often designed to generate over 1000 MW, NASA has designed small modular nuclear plants to deploy at space bases that generate 10 KW, a completely different scale.

So… The US has plans to build nuclear generators on the moon too, kilopower has been an ongoing project for the past decade and I have no doubt we’ll be ready to deploy one of these reactors as soon as we start building infrastructure on the moon again in the near future.

Nuclear power is not new for space, it’s an obvious choice, one of only two choices in fact. And for what it’s worth, Russia/USSR has had far more nuclear powered space probes over the years than the US has, so this isn’t exactly new for them either.

As for cooling, yeah, if you generate power you need to dissipate that heat. Your generator will put out heat which needs to be dealt with and then using that electricity will also generate heat which needs to be dissipated. That said, one kind of power is not harder than another, dissipating a megawatt of solar power is just as complicated as a megawatt of nuclear. So the real question is: how much power do you need? The complexity of the project will scale relative to that.

All in all, we’ve used nuclear power in space before and we will need to do it again, radiators are not all that hard.

Well, you can’t put permanent infrastructure on the moon without a plan to power it. So, a power plant has to be the first step, that’s why NASA has the kilopower program, even though we don’t have a permanent moon base yet.

A swear, if a kilo of coke can pass a round of memtest, we’ll be in business.

Recycle, reuse!

The price of cocaine is dropping?

…

Can we make RAM out of cocaine?

Those were his words, but then again, I didn’t see the show, didn’t see the contract.

It’s disappointing to see so many posts from outraged users railing about the dangers of automation, who clearly haven’t read the article and don’t seem to understand what actually happened.

This story is actually what it purports to be, it’s an example of a safety system working correctly in an emergency. That’s all it is, not all that exciting to be honest. There was no bug or accidental activation, or AI uprising.

The only weird part is that the pilots could have landed themselves if they had wanted to, but chose not to. If there were any passengers on board that would have certainly been called a criminally reckless choice. As it was just the pilots though, I suppose it was just bold/dangerous/dumb. (Though on the other hand, they learned more about their aircraft in the process and they tested a critical safety feature, which are both good things.)

Heh, good luck trying to push an automation technology that a pilot can’t disable. You’re right, there probably are situations where that makes sense, but they would be very rare edge cases. And pilots really do hate being taken out of the control loop. Ideally they really don’t want there to be any computer action that doesn’t have an override (which I think generally makes sense).

This falls in the same category as the MCAS crashes. An automated system wrested control from the pilots, and the system evidently could not be disabled. That is the exact scenario that caused the MCAS crashes.

The only thing though, is that is absolutely not what happened here, at all.

Here’s a quote from the (quite short) article:

Autoland “automatically engaged exactly as designed when the cabin altitude exceeded the prescribed safe levels” and the pilots “made the decision to leave the system engaged,” Townsley said

The pilots saw the warnings and presumably could have taken over by doing just about anything, but with no passengers to put in jeopardy, they decided to sit back and see what happened.

There is no flaw here, no bug, this is not a problem. This is what happens when everything works.

Edit: Well, not everything was working, that beechcraft does have to have its pressurization system checked out for sure.