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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • To complete that good answer, satellites in GEO will experience eclipses 2x21 days per year (around March and September). The eclipse duration during these periods will vary from 0 to 70minutes and then down to 0 again, with one eclipse per day, around midnight.

    So your solar plant in space will work 100% of the time 320+ days a year, and will have a small down time that can be up to an hour in the middle of the night otherwise. Not perfect but actually very manageable with a little bit of storage on the ground.

    Overall, the main concern with these systems is the total cost, including launch cost. It is hard to tell if it will be competitive with solar + battery on the ground.






  • The main difficulty for this kind of tug is finding the market. There is currently only a very limited market for such missions:

    1. If the customer is big enough, then the rocket itself can do the injection. Otherwise, you can try to find another customer on the same orbit
    2. If it is a geo satellite, then it will have electric propulsion and adding a separate stage is hard to justify just by shortened transfer time
    3. If you are planning on reusing the same tug for multiple missions, you are fighting the rocket equation. This thruster here makes it really hard, you need more efficiency.

    The market fit is quite difficult, and this requires high investment. So very hard problem until we have an actual space economy with people on the moon.





  • It means that U.S. automakers find it cheaper to have their vehicles made in China and then import them in the U.S., rather than make them directly in the U.S. in the first place.

    This means that manufacturing in China is so cheap that even with the tariffs, it is more cost effective to go there. If your goal with the tariffs is to level the game, then this should not happen (no one would relocate like that unless there is a massive gain).











  • The cheapest ICE Dacia is 12000€. I suspect you are comparing a new car price vs a used car price, which is quite unfair.

    You can get a used Dacia or a used Zoe for a bit under 10000€, which has probably less km than your car (see this one https://zoomcar.fr/dacia-spring-business-2020-33479218.html, or the numerous Zoe). Now granted these are not great cars: but it is hard to compare a 5-10 year-old ICE with an electric, simply because the electric used market is still small as these cars are new.

    Now you raise a valid point on the chargers. But this is coming and that’s why no one (almost no one, I’m sure there are lunatics somewhere) wants to ban ICE right away. You ban new ones in 7 years, and this means that in 17 years a good majority of the cars will be electric. Chargers are quite quick to install, especially low power ones. There are many companies focusing on street light charging and as the number of electric cars grow, public chargers will become more available with a denser network. It’s really a chicken and egg problem - they won’t install massive amounts of chargers for them to stay unused.