The conops for this doesn’t make sense to me. Not only is it in a weird orbit but after the first lunar landing, which will have two astronauts, the rest will have four. With all 4 crew members on the lunar surface who will be working on gateway? SLS can max launch once a year. Are we really going to give up a lunar landing opportunity for a gateway only mission? Already 1 mission a year for a couple weeks is a big change from a quarter century of continuous operations on ISS. Mix of commercial space stations in LEO supported by regular NASA crews and lunar mission with eventual base seems the most inspiring and beneficial way to keep consistent presence in space was explaining exploration and building private space capability/infrastructure.
Yes I could see deals being worked out where gateway partners instead build parts of a lunar base. The international partnerships a likely the biggest piece going for gateway in terms of not being cancelled
I have fond memories of the time I visited Jura. It’s an island of 100 people and 10,000 deer. When we stayed at the one hotel there we had an amazing hostess who showed us to our room and then when we went down to the (only) bar was our bartender and later at the restaurant she was our server. It was an amazing small community. There is also a museum in town dedicated to people who have lived on the island. My favorite description of one women was “she was known for causing general mischief on the island”. I didn’t realize that Orwell lived there until I visited. I didn’t understand how that place would inspire 1984 but this article gives another perspective of how the environment may have affected him that i never considered.
To add to this it’s not only cosmonauts assigned to this soyuz it’s 2 Russians and 1 American. Doesn’t change making the right decision for protecting crew but may add complexity if Roscosmos is confident in the Soyuz for returning crew but NASA isn’t.
Additionally depending on damage Soyuz may be on a clock to leave no matter what (with or without crew) to prevent it from being stuck to ISS.
Big question is what caused the damage and thus what risk there is to re-entry. Lots of tough risk trades to make.
I’ve been using Cryptomator for a few months now. Very happy with it. Closest to “main stream” file encryption tool that I’ve used. Confident anyone in my family could use it without much instruction.
Lower cost to transportation is key for pretty much any economic growth. People and companies have significantly more plans than just a couple probes every few years. Exploration, mining, tourism, scientific research, manufacturing are a couple things that come to mind. There are probably many more ideas than what i can think of and that’s the point. Make it cheaper for people with ideas to make them a reality. When only the largest of governments can afford to put something into space then we won’t see much innovation/economic growth.
SpaceX has drastically lowered cost/mass to put something in orbit with Falcon 9. If they are successful with Starship they will do so again. Already lowering cost to orbit is increasing access to space for companies, universities, and governments. This is huge. Their success has lead to a number of new companies trying to innovate in a similar way and even. altering how governments plan to run future space programs.
I hope the ability to use your EV battery to backup your house power becomes an expected capability in the future. Glad Ford included it. Too bad Tesla backed away from it, i’m guessing due to their powerwall business.
I recently moved photos from google photos to icloud using google takeout and it removed meta data from the vast majority of my photos.
Photos with correct dates and locations in google photos not longer have any of that data in icloud. Makes icloud photos a lot less usable, not sure if anyone else has had this issue (can't find any articles on it)
Anyways agree that google takeout needs improvement.
If they don’t switch to another provider they are automatically switched to a provider of last resort (POLR) which is a predetermined provider based on ERCOT policy.
The basis of this argument is that there were generators who were waiting for prices to go higher before going online. I don’t believe that was the case here. Plants weren’t able to come online because natural gas lines, piles of coal, wind turbines, nuclear coolant water were freezing over and could not be used.
I don’t know the right answer but forcing electricity rates to the highest allowed limit for a week allowed these generators to make insane amount of money and i’m convinced it improved the outcome of this whole disaster.
Couldn’t have said it better. This was the same experience I had. Unfortunately a lot of the bad press came from examples of people who signed up and agreed to Griddy’s terms (which were super straightforward) and then acted as if they were on a fixed rate plan.
Griddy was a tiny portion of the market and the focus on them only benefits those who couldn’t keep the grid reliable and profited immensely.
Griddy is/was an electricity retailer that sold at wholesale prices to customers. The cold front in texas lead to extremely high prices. This impact has been most evident for Griddy users who did not reduce their energy usage. There have been many news reports about people with $9k or $16k energy bills.
Griddy is a very small part of the market and didn’t make any additional profit from the raised prices but all the same they have had a lot of press.
Oh for sure, especially if they had electric heat instead of gas. I just think a more rounded article would speak to the usage not just the final price.
They provide real-time information through their app and also online. Here are some examples of what that looks like https://www.griddy.com/texas/app.
They also provided warnings to customers days before that spikes were coming.
I'm not sure what additional communication could be asked for. If losing power killed your internet then you really don't need to worry about power consumption anymore. If you lost it for another reason then it would make sense to assume energy was still expensive until you heard otherwise.
They provided daily update emails/tweets during the storm as well.
I imagine it's not legal to have a cut-off point where suddenly you have your power removed.
I’m a griddy customer and am still happy with the service after this past week. Griddy is not for everyone not by a long shot but I think it’s getting unfair press on this past week.
As a Griddy customer I wanted to share some additional perspective:
Griddy’s app provides real-time prices as well as the projected prices for the next couple days.
During the past week i was getting notifications every five minutes on the current price.
Their interface shows your daily energy usage in terms of kwh as well as price.
The whole point of being a customer at griddy is to reduce power use during spikes. They do a great job providing data on when you need to reduce usage. It’s in their interest for customers to have this data. As far as i can tell they only make their money from the $10 monthly fee. High prices don’t help them.
In the end we essentially unpowered everything. We charged phones, left our modem/router on and kept our gas furnace set to 59. With blankets it was fine for us and we knew this was a possibility going into this plan (minus the extra difficulty of covid)
I think it’s disingenuous to have these articles about high bills without providing how much energy they were consuming and what they were using it on. Even at $9/kwh a $9000 bill would more energy usage in a couple days than we have in a month or more (we live in 4 bed house)