I mean, that’s always been the case. That’s literally spaceX’s primary job, putting things in space for NASA. It’s the same for every launch provider in the US.

Uh, basically no.

NASA has experiments to run, spaceX has no idea what science NASA is interested in doing. So having SpaceX make the payload doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

Yeah, I really could not understand the motivation behind that. Why throw away such a valuable brand? I mean the name was even a clever play on words that also gave them a cute bird icon/mascot.

“Twitter”, with that bird logo is just a slam dunk, that’s solid gold branding… It’s insane to randomly “go a different direction” and then land at “X”. If I was their brand coordinator or director of marketing when they made that change, I’d resign then and there.

Changing their name to “X” was essentially lighting 20% of their assets on fire on day 1.

Oh, I like that one! Direct and to the point.

Hey, since when is it bad to want to kill Nazis? Last I heard that was generally encouraged. It’s the whole moral foundation that the first person shooter genre was based on.

Ok, but can I copy and paste the entire text of an ebook into one of these voice generators and get out a simple mp3 result that doesn’t suck? Asking for a friend.

I mean, yeah, you could do that.

I’m not sure if it would be better than a secret underground base… But you could do it.

With an underground base you could even have the one connection to it be a hard-line, not wireless. You could construct it with a smaller crew, easier to keep under wraps. And I expect that would still be less than 1/100th the price of building it on the moon.

Anyway, I do think the ultimate off site data storage location is a pretty entertaining idea, i’d bet it could make sense for some things, I just can’t imagine what.

If you were on Mars, for example, you would not want to have to contact Earth every single time you wanted to load a web page. And so you would contact Earth the first time to load it. And then it would be saved locally.

Don’t ISPs already do something like this to save on bandwidth on their side? Just saving local copies of commonly accessed files.

At least I remember hearing about that a decade ago, I wonder if that can still happen now that there’s basically https everywhere.

But at any rate, I believe there are at least well established methods for that.

Ok… Data redundancy is a possible application… I will tentatively say that’s a feasible goal, if still probably a stupid one.

I mean, how often do data centers upgrade storage drives? Cause the cost of doing that in space is… unreasonable.

You joke, but actually that is a thing.

When research projects involve super-cooling a substance, after you’ve done as much as you can with convective cooling, researchers will sometimes use lasers to cancel out vibrations within the substance, and cancelling vibrations essentially equals cooling.

Lol, this is the truth. There are many cool opportunities for industry in space, but I gotta be honest, I don’t think datacenters are one of them…

Yeah, I mean what’s this Charles guy’s deal? Is he just like… nice to everyone? What an asshole…

It all depends on what you value.

If you want the fastest phone for the lowest price, then you’re buying into those shady business practices and something akin to slave labor. (Not to sound judgey, I’ve bought my share of iPhones and galaxies too)

But if you want a phone that won’t contribute to a landfill as soon, was made by people paid a fair wage, where any hardware failure doesn’t make you start over with a new phone. Then try something like a fairphone. Specs aside, you’re paying for a different set of features.

I second this comment. It can be extremely tricky to solder something so small with so many contacts so close together.

But… if you get some sharp tweezers, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could pull some lint out of that USB port. And more often than not, that’ll make all the difference and it’ll charge normally again.

Blown capacitors are nice and obvious.

Most capacitors you’ll find are cylindrical, with a flat side of the cylinder pointed up. They’ll usually have a big X cut into that top side, allowing it to flex a bit. But if that top side is bulging a lot, that’s a warning sign, if it bulged so much that it opened up and it either looks burned on top, or some kind of paste is actually seeping out, then that thing is way past done.

With capacitors a visual inspection is really all you need. You’d actually need more expensive specialized equipment than a standard multimeter to actually test their capacitance. But if you look at it, and your description might include words like “exploded” or “popped”, or “wtf is this mess?”, then it’s bad.

Yeah, it sounded weird when I had it like that, so I added the disc to the end. Turned out, it was only 4 characters, so not a big imposition.

We are in space near the sun… And we have successfully used solar as far out as Jupiter.

Haha, no I didn’t account for lunar eclipses, but that lasts what, 2 hours?

But yeah, not falling over definitely improves the whole mission. No argument there.

Would it barely work, or would it always work?

If you plan to land on the pole, at a high altitude, you could potentially have direct line of sight to the sun 24/7 all year round. From the ground, the sun would appear to travel left to right along the horizon, making a full circle over the course of a month. You just need your solar panels pointed to the sides, not up.

However, if they aren’t directly on the pole, they could still plan their landing to be in a location that gets sunlight for 15 earth days straight, with 0 interruption. As that might be more than the necessary time period for their experiments, that’s probably perfect. And that doesn’t even require being at a high elevation.

Also, being on the pole doesn’t result in dimmer sunlight than on the equator like it would on earth. No atmosphere means the poles get the same completely unfiltered sunlight.

Look, the vast majority of lunar landers (and there have been quite a few) have used solar power, it’s the obvious choice in space.

I mean, you’re not wrong. A low center of mass is legitimately a good idea.

I really don’t understand the tall moon lander strategy… I mean, if you’re going to design it with a high center of gravity, then design it to fall over… Just use two landing legs instead of four, to ensure it falls over the right way. Then you put the solar panels on the side, so that when it topples over they’re facing up.

I’ve literally done this in Kerbal space program, it’s a pretty reliable landing system if your probe is tall.

Well, if we have boots on the moon, at that point we don’t need probes like these. At that point you just drop a sensor, or whatever experiment you want directly on the surface.