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Comment Re:full moon, full earth (Score 1) 84

Because they can change the spacecraft's attitude to put whatever they want into the window while flying along the same trajectory?

Guess what, they probably could have taken a picture of the full sun too. Amazing what you can do when you are somewhere in the 360,000 kilometers between Earth and Luna.

Comment Re:54 Years to Do Less (Score 1) 84

Only hateful individual I'm seeing here is you, using the same stupid hateful dipshittery twice now.

You have no idea what the selection criteria was, and how it was applied. The NASA Director of manned flight operations knows, and that's who ultimately selects the crew.

You, and everyone else in this thread, is speaking out of ignorance and stupidity.

Comment Re:It certainly is, IF... (Score 1) 84

Now only if there was some way that they could bring enough water for the multi-month trip to Mars, and have that water also be used for secondary purposes like radiation shielding...

These are engineering problems. Engineers haven't started working on them outside of "well how about..." because we don't have any funding for manned Mars spacefilght, just the same as nobody was working on lunar landers until there was a manned spaceflight mission to put people on the moon.

Comment Re:Its really all about logistics (Score 1) 84

If you already have a space station in Earth orbit, why do you need one in Lunar orbit too?

Why would you not seek to do your interplanetary burn direct from Earth orbit, like we have done with literally every single thing we've ever sent to Mars?

Not being snarky, just wondering if there is some delta-V advantage to being higher up the well, but in a different (lesser) well.

Comment Re:Is it worth it to put a manned crew on the craf (Score 1) 84

Yes, because it's never a good idea to solve issues like this early on incrementally more difficult missions. I want them figuring out the fucking space toilet right in the middle of landing on the surface myself.

What an absolutely stupid thing to say on a tech site where I would bet the vast majority of readers practice incremental development every single day.

Comment What? (Score 1) 86

How did early agrarian society ever survive without an AI telling your cows when to move to a different patch of grass to munch on?

As my father is a dairyman, this seems like a really expensive and stupid solution to a question that nobody ever asked in 5000+ years.

The cow already knows when to move to different pasture, because the grass is fucking short where they are.

Comment Re:RAM (Score 1) 63

VM workloads. Specifically, I've decided I'm done letting Microsoft destroy my windows install that I need for things, so I have virtualized it and am passing through the GPU, audio device, and a USB hub into the VM using virtualized IO.

They release some hum-dinger of a patch that screws Windows up, and I restore my automatic snapshot and block the patch from installing.

There's extra memory overhead of running Debian and the IOMMU setup. And Windows is a fucking hog. And I use a second GPU on a display that stays with the Debian "bare metal" install.

I have to reboot the Windows VM at least once a week because it memory leaks itself into oblivion and won't wake up until I use the hypervisor to reset the VM.

Comment Re:RAM (Score 1) 63

It's kind of pissing me off actually. I'm finally to the point where the 32GB I have in my desktop isn't sufficient for what I'm doing on it anymore, and I don't want to spend the entire price of a new mini PC to get it to 64GB.

So I have to grit my teeth through swapping and frequent reboots.

Fuck the AI billionaire bros.

Comment Re: Spacecraft can have solar sails (Score 1) 185

a method of producing Methane

As far as that goes, if you find water ice on Mars and have a spare nuclear reactor around, you've got your methane factory:

1. mine water ice
2. split H2O -> H2 + O (electrolysis - this is where the reactor comes in handy)
3. Sabatier Reaction: combine the H2 with atmospheric CO2 (CO2 + 4H2 CH4 + 2H2O), requires industrial heat source (reactor also handy here) and a catalyst bed (nickel)
4. Recycle the H2O byproduct back into the intake

You gotta have energy though for it to scale. Roughly 17kWh = 1kg of rocket propellant. To fill a Starship back up (1200 metric tons) it would only take ~20.4GWh of energy. So there's that.

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