A funny story about how SpaceX dealt with clandestine toilet issues on the recent Micturation 4 flight. This kind of thing is SpaceX's kryptonite—if you look at what breaks on ISS, it's a slog of unglamorous maintenance issues with no cool engineering fixhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/spacex-toilet-nasa.html …
-
-
Remember that the current SpaceX plan for Mars is to send an autonomous remote factory there in 2024 to produce 240 tons of propellant using the same technology that died on the ISS despite 6 years of constant repairs, having generated one ton of water. https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/86470/ICES-2020-378.pdf …
Show this thread -
The reason an entire discipline (chemical engineering) exists is because taking chemical reactions from milligrams to grams to kilos to tons of output is hard even before you try to do it with space dads in low earth orbit, let alone expect it to run unattended for years on Mars.
Show this thread -
If you're not obsessed with space, you may not realize that we lack the technology to keep a crew alive for a month with closed-loop life support on the front lawn of the Kennedy Space Center, let alone in any kind of harsh environment.
Show this thread -
The real story arc of Breaking Bad wasn't "high school chemistry teacher turns into the devil", but "self-funding research chemist designs and builds industrial scale pharmaceutical plant"
Show this thread -
I will be honest that my favorite scenario is where an elderly Musk retires to the small colony of a dozen obsessives eking out a living on Mars, and then that gets hit by the planet-killer asteroid.
Show this thread -
My question for the "Mars is plan B for humanity" crowd is, what's plan C? Unless you like blimps and acid rain, there's no other planet we can colonize to play dodgeball with planet-killing meteors. Why not just chart the solar system with robots and work the actual problem?
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
we can do both. and we do Mars in part because it is hard. and its exciting, inspiring. and getting a large population living on another planet sustainably will reduce downsides of an apocalypse on Earth, and sooner we start towards that goal sooner we get its benefits
-
the idea of mars as safety hatch is suicidal fantasy. people could be living in 10km high skyscrapers on every inch of antarctica and covering the seas with floating cities and it would still be 10000 times easier than mars
- Show replies
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.