The opted for human-servicing missions because 1) the Hubble was designed with human-servicing in mind, and 2) no robotic mission (circa early 90s), teleoperated, could have accomplished what the human astronauts could do. Furthermore, the human missions went further: repairing and replacing components that weren't designed to ever be serviced in space. There were all manner of hiccups on all of the servicing missions that required human proprioception (i.e., "this feels rough", even through space suit gloves) and realtime on-the-fly judgment to overcome.

After the Columbia disaster, NASA looked at robotic servicing Hubble, decided it was infeasible at any reasonable cost or timeline, and opted for a final human servicing mission. On that mission, they added a docking ring, so that it'd be easier to dock a robotic spacecraft in the future: most likely for de-orbiting, but potentially for orbit-boosting or even robotic servicing. There are no serious plans to do the latter as far as I'm aware.

Single-phase voltage in Japan is 100 V. If you thought 120 V led to problems with high currents, Japanese electricity will really shock you.

Not to mention that half the country is on 60 Hz AC, while the other half is 50 Hz [ref]. That probably doesn't make a lot of difference to an EV charger, but it is an added complication.

Once again, we decided to check the box marked "be evil" - for consistency's sake as much as anything.

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Randomly posting Futurama quotes on Slashdot since 2003

Come to think of it, that almost sounds like a Futurama quote.

Can't wait for the conspiracy nuts to latch onto this, and think Angels and Demons was a documentary.

Betteridge is my best friend!

Seems like the main advantage could be that the solar panels will provide consistent energy, but TFA did not go into the energy requirements, or how they were met. If each "node" in their system generates/uses 10kW, for example, it may be a good alternative to building data centers on the ground?

Except that they don't. I could not find details about the destination orbit, but the Long March 2D is strictly a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) vehicle. A SSO orbit, hovering right on the terminator, could theoretically have near-continuous sunlight. But this launch occurred at close to noon local time, so it is almost certainly not that. Instead, this was almost certainly a LEO launch, meaning they'll spend about half their time in shadow.

Getting electrical power in space is not actually that difficult. The real problem for this will be collecting and dumping the waste heat. Roughly speaking, every watt of electrical generation needs to be matched with a watt of heat dissipation. (Have a look at the ISS for comparison - it's got a large solar array, and a bunch of radiators.) Conventional datacenters rely mostly on force air convection - pretty tough to do in a vacuum. So maybe you use heat sinks with circulating liquid instead. Then you need to get the heat from that liquid to a set of radiators, which will be approximately 50% as large as the solar panels themselves.

All do-able, of course, but so much effort for the amount of compute power you'd manage to deploy. Oh and you need to get it all into orbit, at around $10,000/kg (for a Long March 2D). For the same cost, you could build 10-100x as much computing power on the ground.

Came here to ask the same question. Given the added costs of launching compute into space, it seems like you could build 10x-100x the same amount of computing power on the ground, and spread it across many locations.

Partly it is the speed of the robot. By comparing the BBC video against human-cubers on youtube, you can see this robot is relatively sedate. (Still fast in absolute terms, but slow compared to human moves.) Moreover, this robot is, shall we say, single-threaded. It can only execute a single move at a time. Human cubers will often use all their fingers to execute more than one move at once.

If you built a robot that could do the (single-threaded) moves 10x as fast as a human, you'd actually have to start worrying about heat buildup, and possibly melting the surfaces sliding against each other!

The Long Now Foundation has experimented with creating discs of etched nickel that are like microfiche - you just need enough magnification to read the plain analog images. Their test subject was the Book of Genesis in 1500 different languages.

This is, of course, for archival purposes - not day-to-day use. The idea is lots of copies of a relatively small subset of human culture. It's not (re)writable, not exactly random access, you'd need to re-digitize it to feed into a computer (or the far off future equivalent) to really use it.

Can't wait for the sequel to Armageddon, where Ben Affleck leads a rag tag team of drillers to tap the water of Mars for a new colony.

Explosions ensue. Why? Because Michael Bay, that's f*%^ing why.

If you choose the correct nuclear technology, there is a massive positive environmental benefit. The reactor can consume existing nuclear waste as fuel. Converting a 10,000 year high level radioactivity problem into a 300 year low level radioactivity problem. Maybe build enough of such reactors for the cleanup?

There have been a number of breeder reactors - the kind that can "burn" otherwise spent fuel - built over the years. They've pretty much all been demonstration plants, and aimed mostly for making plutonium for bombs, not generating power. As far as I can tell, there are exactly two ([1], [2]) utility-scale breeder plants generating electricity today, both in Russia. China may get one online...eventually.

Attempts to build commercial reactors to burn nuclear waste have mostly failed, because it's fantastically difficult technologically and really not economical. They're also a massive proliferation risk. Summary here

Dr. Egon Spengler is impressed, and would like to know how he could add to his collection.

Two trillion dollars in the red, every year.

Folks love to trot that one out as a way to justify their budget cut of choice. But take a look at federal spending. Out of ~$6,500 Billion spent each year, nearly 2/3 is "mandatory" spending: Social Security (~$1500B), Medicare (~$875B), Medicaid and CHIP (~$550B), interest on the debt (~$875B), the VA (~$300B), etc. Then there's defense spending (~$850B). It really is true: the United States government is an insurance company with an army.

All the non-defense discretionary stuff that folks love to hate on, and somehow think we can eliminate the deficit by cutting, amounts amounts to less than $800B. But most of that is stuff people genuinely like, and mostly what people think of when they think of "the government". Things like national infrastructure (roads, airports), law enforcement (DoJ), assistance programs (SNAP, TANF), disaster relief (FEMA), educational assistance (college loans, public schools). The "science" that people benefit from every day is a miniscule cost to the taxpayer by comparison, and we get enormous benefit from it. You could cut all of NIH ($48B), NASA ($24B), and NOAA ($6.5B) and you'd save...1% of the federal budget.

If you want to tackle the deficit, look to where the real money is. Then also look to the other side of the ledger: revenues.

Have you checked the weather lately? Then you used federal science.

What you don't understand is there is no system that tells you what percentage that is. How much should be assigned to each minute of film?

I'm not too worried. If Hollywood accounting can make blockbusters turn into losses (on paper) then they can surely make any film qualify as "American-made".