Yep, definitely already on people's minds: "China’s use of its SJ-21 to remove a GEO satellite that had been shedding debris to a very high graveyard orbit in January 2022 has been repeatedly used as evidence that they can threaten other on-orbit satellites" [0]
The FAA does have licenses over launch and they are trying to impose rules for upper stages of launch vehicles [0]. The FAA said they would complete these regulations in 2025 [1], but I haven't seen something saying they have gone in to effect yet.
The FCC does deal with disposal requirements for US satellites that are launched. In order to secure a license from the FCC you have to prove that your satellite will meet the latest guideline that it will be disposed of (either de-orbit for LEO, or moved to disposal orbit for higher orbits) within 5 years after mission complete [2]. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to apply to upper stages for some reason even though I would say that it is an orbit object that gets licensed and would "complete the mission" after deploying the satellites and have to abide by the 5 year rule.
There was a proposed theory on this the spread of absorption created more stability in the power generation of plants over different conditions. This was supposed to be a more important factor than being able to absorb the peak and highest energy.
I think this paper is what I was looking for, thanks. I may have to reread it after becoming more familiar with the chemical/physical nature of:
> Photoexcitation energy is rapidly transferred through an antenna network before reaching the reaction center
I didn't know that. With this in mind, perhaps a better formulation of my question is not:
> Why are plants green?
But instead:
> Why are green photosynthetic pigments more common than others?
Based on my read of this paper, the answer to that would be that a pigment which absorbed only a single narrow band of light would be prone to being either over or under powered most of the time. Absorbing red and blue, but not green, provides more opportunities to deliver constant power at the reaction center despite varying light conditions.
I totally agree with the space is hard, it fails sometimes. I been in the space industry on both the super rigorous high cost, high mission assurance side of things and the low cost commercial launch 10 and hopefully most of them work side of things. The lunar lander is an ambitious first project and two failures in a row is real rough, but definitely happens the space industry in new ventures. I'm sure there are great engineers there and what they are doing is tough.
But...specifically on funding for Intuitive Machines I don't understand how NASA also gave then an IDIQ contract for up to $4.8 billion for lunar communications and PNT services [0] based on the experience of one lunar lander that didn't actually work.
Yeah, was cool to see Blue Ghost be successful. And do the point about tall and thin, the Blue Ghost lander is much more squat than the Intuitive Machines landers
Yep, most of the previous Mars rover prior to Curiosity did it this way. They had a number of balloons surrounding the rover and landed and bounced along the surface. Then the balloons were deflated in a particular order so the rover ended up the right way up. But for these there was some atmosphere to slow the descent with a parachute and balloons. But for landing on the moon you need the thrusters to slow you down for landing so it can't just be balloons on either side. Presumably you could still use something to slow you down that isn't part of the science mission for the lander that gets ejected right before landing an then let the balloons hit the surface and drop down. But now there are multiple mechanisms and things to do the landing which means more money.
On the moon, you would eventually slow down after bouncing because of the energy loss from the not very elastic balloons. But it might take a while and you might bounce into a crater or something.
I don't know how common it is, but this is the first time I had seen an announcement of a large solar installation with bifacial modules. I assume that the bifacial modules are more expensive, but I don't know what goes in to the math to make them worth it or not. Does somewhere snowier get more benefit from the bifacial solar arrays because you can get a lot of albedo from the snow?
There seems to be a real interesting mix of pros and cons (total watts generated through the year, by time of day, susceptibility to dirt and hail damage, reflections, etc.), especially with regards to mounting. This guy goes into a lot of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVO1IyfA9M
Land per sqft is usually a lot more expensive than panels.
Bifacial above ground capture more of solar, esp if the ground reflects solar back.
Many YouTube experiments where people have captured an extra 100-150W from back panels yielding 500W+ per panel.
And bifacial is only slightly more expensive than mono panels. With higher efficiency the price is worth it.
For residential solar with batteries, the price of panels is barely 10% of the cost. Labor, permitting, connectors, inverters, framing take a huge chunk of the cost.
I imagine utility scale has lower overhead but the tradeoff for bifacial would have given positive ROI.
Maybe they will angle the panels differently during the winter so snow falls off, and then the back panel will become more important capturing reflections and low sun.
If you want to look at someone that is further along on a concept like this you can look at SpinLaunch. Exactly what it sounds like with a gigantic centrifuge to spin and throw things really fast. But they are still throwing a small two-stage rocket.
[0] https://spacenews.com/chinese-on-orbit-servicing-and-debris-...