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 …
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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.
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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.
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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"
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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.
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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?
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