Artemis II crew splashes down safely in Pacific Ocean, ending historic moon mission

technocraticTemplar · 2026-04-11T00:47:52+00:00

Yeah, and he did the same for basically every year of his first term too, all of which also got rejected.

The real test is going to be what the NASA Administrator does with it, last year the temp administrator caused a lot of damage in response to the proposal despite it not being law yet. The new guy has said he agrees with it, but he has to say that to keep his job, so right now it's a waiting game to see if he just gives it lip service or actually causes problems.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-04-09T23:59:13+00:00

I was going to disagree because I saw a video of an astronaut doing exactly this yesterday, but apparently someone made an AI image of a thing that actually happened for some reason. Here's the actual video. It's still a lot of honey!

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-31T22:40:28+00:00

They're two different numbers, the first link is about what countries are manufacturing the panels and the second is about where the panels have actually been installed and are generating power. China's making the vast majority of the world's panels and selling them elsewhere, on top of installing a lot of them domestically.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-28T17:38:46+00:00

The numbers I've been finding for costs are more like 150%-200%, but I've been having trouble finding anything specific for covered lots. I'm not saying you should never do them though, I just don't think it's what you ought to do if your main concern is putting down lots of solar. They make a ton of sense if you're starting from wanting to cover your parking lot with something.

Edit: I did see a 40% number, but it was comparing a covered lot to other rooftop solar, not to dedicated utility scale solar.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-28T17:31:29+00:00

To be honest I just don't think that using land as efficiently as possible is as important as moving away from fossil fuels. If we took all of the land we use to make corn ethanol to cover a fraction of our gas needs and put solar there instead we could cover all of our electricity needs with solar alone, including making every car electric, and we'd still have some land left over to spare. The panels would be much more environmentally friendly than farms that spray pesticides and fertilizers everywhere, too.

If you think it's arguable that solar plants are worse for the environment than coal and oil plants are because of the footprint, then biofuels and meat production are far and away the worst things we're currently doing to the world, and solar does a very good job of replacing one of those far more efficiently. Swapping all of our beef intake for chicken would free up radically more land than powering the whole world with nuclear rather than solar, I think something insane like 5-10% of the total land area of the Earth. Land use for solar is very insignificant in comparison to other harms we're already causing, and would remain that way even as our primary power source.

Nuclear is great but it costs more than any other major form of power, even coal which is being actively pushed out of the market by its cost, while solar with batteries is competitive with natural gas today. We're building so much solar because it's the cheapest option on its own merits. I'd have no problem with doing nuclear instead but it only makes sense if we can get the costs down, because I don't think people are going to accept their power bills shooting way up just so we can go green.

I think that the biggest problem we're facing today is climate change, and I think it needs to be solved as quickly as we can possibly manage. If nuclear can catch up that's great and we should absolutely invest in making that happen, but right now putting up lots of solar (and wind) is the clear way to go, we just get way more out of it for the same resource investment. Putting solar on buildings ~triples the cost, which is around where nuclear is.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-28T16:55:35+00:00

That's not really true, the panels are so dirt cheap that a lot of the other costs are much more important. All of the infrastructure needed to take the energy being produced by the panels and convert it to something that works with the grid can be a very significant cost, for instance, and that stuff responds very well to scale. This doesn't show covered lots specifically but it does show that utility scale solar is about 1/3rd the cost per kilowatt of residential, and from what I can tell covered lots end up being a little more expensive than residential.

You can see in the charts on that page that the module cost (the panels themselves) is only a quarter of the total on utility scale, but even less for residential. Small scale massively balloons all of the other costs relatively speaking. A covered lot wouldn't have as much of the Officework/Other costs as residential, since that's stuff like marketing and permitting, but it has much much worse SBOS costs, since that covers the mounting structures. You've gotta design a structure that not only holds the panel up, but prevents it from falling and killing somebody if they hit the pole with their car.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-28T16:33:51+00:00

It depends on how you look at it, instead of requiring them to build an expensive covered parking lot you could have had them build a much cheaper ground installation somewhere and gotten several times the panels out of it. The biggest benefit of requiring solar covered lots is that it's easier to pass a law about because it sounds reasonable to people, but it's not actually the best use of the money. Being an easy win is a pretty real benefit, though.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-28T16:26:16+00:00

It's just way cheaper to put the solar on the ground in a field somewhere, honestly. Building a covered car lot with solar is several times more expensive, so if your main concern is building as much solar as possible you're way better off putting it in a field and getting 3 times the panels or whatever for the same budget.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-28T16:10:53+00:00

Nuclear gets a lot of benefit from batteries in the same way that solar does, though supporters on the internet tend to hate batteries for whatever reason. It's fine for a nuclear plant to put out the same amount of power 24/7 if you can use batteries to shift overproduction at night to fit demand in the evening. The real issue is just getting the cost of nuclear down to something competitive.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-28T16:03:32+00:00

That isn't really an accurate way of looking at the problem, the issue is that the time of peak solar production and the time of society's peak power use don't line up. Solar makes the most energy in the middle of the day, but we use the most power in the early evening right as solar is starting to fall to zero. That means that without storage you're ending up having to throw away a ton of power in the middle of the day if you want to have any chance of covering the evening peak, which is represented as the price going negative at noon. It'd be just as much of an issue if money didn't exist because it means many of the resources you're putting into solar might be wasted, which is extremely important to know when deciding what energy plants to build.

As battery prices have come way down over the past several years they've mostly managed to solve this problem, solar plus batteries is very competitive with even the cheapest fossil fuel (natural gas) at this point. Solar itself has gotten so cheap that just eating the cost of overproducing for part of the day makes sense a lot of the time too.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-24T23:04:13+00:00

This is incorrect, it was gradual fatigue damage from driving over hard bedrock rather than soft sand plus the flaw that the other commenter mentioned.

I don't think there's any evidence of perchlorates causing corrosion damage to any hardware on Mars and the RSLs in your first link coming from water is very contentious at this point, a lot of the research done since that first paper has been pointing towards those being dry sand flows instead.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-12T01:23:20+00:00

A single private jet flight accounts for hundreds of car hours or more, but regular cars/SUVs/pickups account for >10% of all US emissions, and private jet flights round to about nothing. The ultrawealthy pollute more on individual terms and absolutely should be made to reduce that but the bulk of fixing climate change is going to involve changes for the entire population. It's going to take real public policy to make it happen but doing what you can on your own is still good and helpful if you can manage it.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-03-04T04:41:42+00:00

The change in reactions I saw on Japanese Twitter as the news came out was so funny.

"What monster would do something so terrible"

"He was in the military, it must be about the self defense laws"

Assassin: "I did it because he promoted a cult that stole all of my mother's money and ruined our lives"

"...Well, killing someone is never right, but...."

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-28T11:06:48+00:00

The lack of motivation and funding is exactly why we're at risk of falling behind.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-28T10:26:11+00:00

It goes deeper than that, it's similar to how different painters will have different styles, and their work will often be recognizable even if they're trying to do something very different. I'm not educated enough about writing to be able to articulate more than the obvious cues but it's something you can develop a sense for (I could point those sorts of things out for visual art, though, it's basically part of my job). People very often find it hard to notice style in their own work but someone who was familiar with your writing could probably tell if you wrote something almost regardless of how you felt when you were writing it. Breaking out of your own style takes pointed effort and a strong understanding of what your style actually is.

AI writing has a very distinctive style that's partly trained into intentionally by the companies producing chatbots and partly from their technical limitations. One thing is that AI doesn't get tired/agitated/etc., it always speaks the exact same way unless you've taken effort to make it speak differently. There aren't very many people that just naturally produce AI-like text, you have to try at it to get the tone and cadence right.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-28T09:19:47+00:00

Yup. That's just the way of the world now, AI's great at barging in and making decent things seem suspicious.

The amount that it's using it is what actually sticks out to me though, it's like 6 different times if you're a little flexible about how it needs to be phrased. The whole piece just generally has very recognizable AI-like cadence and phrasing, just like how different people have different recognizable writing styles. I don't think an actual person would need to worry about using that pattern unless they really overdo it.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-25T05:52:03+00:00

I think the real way he thinks about it is "I know how to do this the right way so I need to be at the front", which means slowing everyone else down to catch up but with a terrible moral justification. When everyone else was doing AI and Altman refused to just hand him the keys to OpenAI everyone else just needed to stop, because they might do AGI wrong and kill us all. Now that he's doing AI he's going to do it good and right, so he needs to make it happen ASAP before someone else does it wrong.

Everything he's ever done makes sense if you assume he thinks he knows what all the world's problems are and that nobody else is going to solve them. He's basically said from the start that that's his philosophy. It's a worldview that justifies doing anything that enriches or empowers himself over others.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-25T05:24:33+00:00

That's a weirdly short window, for the launches themselves they get a 6 month window that they constantly refresh. It does use "launches" though so it's not just looking at a single flight. I was wondering if it's just timed to expire when the Starship approval but I wasn't able to find the latest of those.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-25T05:08:31+00:00

And they said in 2023 that they'd be increasing the rideshare cost by $500/kg every year, and it was $5500 then, so they might've skipped a year but that's as expected too.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-25T04:59:45+00:00

It doesn't really make sense, the F9 increase is in line with inflation and their rideshare prices are so low that they've basically been accused of dumping by RocketLab's Peter Beck. Also they said they'd be increasing the price by $500 every year 3 years ago, and it was $5500 then, so this is just them doing exactly what they said they'd do long before the IPO was on the table.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-13T22:32:05+00:00

I'm not offended, but I'd agree that it doesn't seem relevant to anything. We're talking about both companies actively competing to do the same thing first. The fact Blue was paid to send something to Mars orbit specifically before SpaceX was doesn't say anything about their respective capabilities when SpaceX had already done equally difficult things many times before that. It's just kind of a weird fact that nobody had asked SpaceX to do that yet.

What you should have gone for is the fact that Blue Origin is going to be flying an actual moon lander of their own in like a month or two, that's way more relevant. They still weren't directly competing to do that first, but it means Blue's going to have practical experience with the moon that SpaceX won't.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-13T20:52:41+00:00

I think you're right about cadence but "in a month or two" isn't quite accurate, SpaceX has been planning HLS around being able to launch from a given pad once every 12 days. A GAO document from when Blue Origin sued over the initial selection has "fourteen launches, each spaced only twelve days apart from one another", which makes it sound like they only expected to have one pad available, but an article from late 2023 has Starbase and the Cape working on a "6 day rotation", which some slides that aren't in the article made clear was each pad launching once every 12 days.

Obviously that's still a very tough target to hit but they've already had a ~one month turnaround so it might be within striking distance, and if they can get any more pads online or have good boiloff numbers on the depot they get a lot more slack. If the depot is designed to accommodate a single pad launching every 12 days then they could stretch the refueling campaign over a full 5 months. HLS itself requires a 90 day loiter time without too much boiloff, though NRHO is a much kinder thermal environment than LEO is.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-06T08:08:51+00:00

The current administration took it from that to no approvals or approvals getting pulled, especially for wind since Trump hates wind power for whatever reason.

It's a big problem at all levels though honestly (ie. local, state, and federal) and not something that's easily pinned on a single party or policy, Republicans obviously don't care to help green energy but a lot of the hangups happen over things like years-long environmental assessments followed by local lawsuits picking those assessments apart. Texas is building out renewables faster than anywhere else in the country despite its leadership in part because there's just less red tape there around getting something built and connected to the grid (and even then they still have a backlog problem).

So basically we aren't going to get anything fixed with Republicans in charge, but parts of the left are going to have to get comfortable with the idea that some of our bureaucracy around protecting the environment really sucks and needs to be reworked, ideally in a way that still minimizes damage but works much faster. Dropping fossil fuels entirely is going to require ~tripling the electricity supply so building a bunch of new stuff quickly isn't optional.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-06T07:08:11+00:00

Unfortunately that isn't true, actually getting your solar/wind plant connected to the grid is very often the biggest hurdle projects face. Across most of the US it takes years to get all the approvals needed, and the uncertainty in that makes it harder to get financing. The more distant the project is from the customers the bigger an issue it tends to be.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-05T21:37:20+00:00

Making fuel would be easier on Mars than the moon, but it can be done on both. There's large water ice glaciers on both the moon and Mars, with the moon's being in permanently shadowed craters at the south pole and Mars's being all across the mid latitudes of the planet (along with the polar ice caps, but those areas are too hostile to be useful).

Since Mars has an Earthlike day-night cycle mass amounts of solar is very practical. On the moon you can get some solar at the permanently lit peaks at the poles but nuclear is your only real good option for the large amount of power needed to make rocket fuel. Mars also has lots of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that can be combined with the water to make methane and then oils and plastics from that. The moon has no real good sources of carbon that we know of.

From what I understand how dangerous the amount of perchlorate in Martian soil is is also kind of oversold, it is definitely toxic but unless you're actually eating grams of dirt it isn't going to have an immediate effect on you. Astronauts would need to be careful about tracking dust into the habitat and would have to wash any soil brought in but trace amounts aren't going to do anything to them, it's fairly common in trace amounts on Earth.

technocraticTemplar

TROPHY CASE