Sadly enough, the international community is really good at infighting and wasting money, and really bad at coming up with a followup for the ISS :( So China, for all its flaws, will have the biggest functioning space station in LEO at some point. ISS operations have just been extended to 2034, but if we get a single micrometeorite hit in the wrong spot (e.g. Node 2), that’ll put an end to it.
Too many people think that when we spend money on space, that we are literally sending the money into orbit. Almost all of it is going back into the economy and keeping tons of businesses alive.
I don’t really get why they got fined when they did the best they could. The satellite was launched 20 years before the law was in effect. It’s not like they knew that in 20 years they would need x amount of fuel (though to be fair, it probably would have been about 150k in extra cost back then)
It’s not like they knew that in 20 years they would need x amount of fuel
Do you think they’re the only ones who launched satellites 20 years ago? They absolutely knew how much fuel they needed and how to properly deorbit without leaving hunks of metal orbiting the earth forever, as evidenced by literally every single other 20+ year old government and satellite operator that is not being fined right now.
Hard agree. If my dumbass can do the math for this in Kerbal Space Program on the back of an envelope, these fucks sure as hell can with entire aerospace engineering teams.
Okay but at least they have their dishes out there for 20+ years. While musk has his starlink for 4 years before self destructing in the atmosphere. Why not fine him for wasting resources and have his dishes last 15-20years
End-of-life satellites must either be deorbited or moved to a graveyard orbit. The issue isn’t about wasted resources - it’s having inert, untrackable debris in an orbit that could be used by others, rendering it useless and dangerous. It’s not an issue for Starlink because they encounter a much greater atmospheric drag compared to most telecommunication satellites, so that issue is fixed with time.
Adding onto what the other commenter said, LEO satellites (the orbit Starlink uses) just don’t have the same operational lifespan as geostationary satellite (the orbit of this Dish Network satellite). They experience a ton more drag because they sit under 1k km, while geostationary are up at 36k km and as such LEO satellites require way more fuel to stay in orbit.
This is not to say 4 years is not on the lower end of LEO satellites which are usually expected to last 7 years, but geostationary satellites are over double the expected life span at 15-20 years. Finally, even though Starlink is more wasteful, their satellites will fall out of orbit pretty damn fast (within a couple years) compared to geostationary satellites (30+ years).
stock tumbles down like a burning fireball of shit
…I’m kinda wondering where bottom is on this. /biz/ on 4chan have been mentioning it as a potential meme stock to join GameStop and Bed Bath and Beyond.
$150k is literally less than an error bar on a line item at a satellite launch company.
Hell they probably operate in Texas or some other state which hates women, in which case $150k is just a female employee getting pregnant and you kicking her out on the curb for a year like Jesus said a good conservative should.
I looked into getting solar installed. Best I could get in my area was $45k for a 10kW system or $97k for a 20kW with 2 power walls for storage. F that, even with government subsided rates.
That’s just absurd, why is it so expensive for you? You could install it yourself for the most part, it’s not super complicated, just physically difficult. And then pay an electrician $500 to connect the inverter to your main panel.
It’s the same here (Denmark), and it’s not about whether we use solar, but if countries more suited for it do, which should decrease the price of electricity across countries. Just like when the Ukraine war caused gas to increase in price, electricity of all of Europe increased in price, disregarding their use or dependency on gas.
Mine took weeks to get an inspector out, and the local permitting fees were thousands (yes, I called the city and county to verify). Then the utility apparently required their own inspection, which took another month, because their guys kept no-showing.
Depends on the area. They’re trying to force every solar installer here to be a licensed electrician, including the guys who slap the panels.
And our local utility and government inspectors take months to come out to do an inspection. It requires one person from the company to sit at the site all day because you never know when they’re actually going to show up. Or if they’re going to show up.
Our insurance doesn’t even allow our inspectors to climb on the roof. We make sure the electrician doingg the wiring is licensed and has liability insurance, and we inspect the electrical panels when they’re done. The workers don’t even have to be there, and neither does the homeowner if the panel is accessible from the street-side of the fence.
We actually prefer doing inspections without the contractors being there. It keeps them from trying to guide our inspectors away from their fuckups and prevents the contractors from trying to argue. We take pictures of the violations, upload them to the permit, and tell them to fix it.
If they don’t, we eventually arrange it to be fixed by another electrician and file a claim against their insurance.
Because it takes months to get inspectors out, we wanted to do everything we could to avoid having them come out again. A lot of times I’ve saved a job by promising to do a spot fix and having the inspector swing back by later that day, or take pictures/video and send it to them.
We have 2 inspectors for all inspections (commercial and residential for all trades) who are also our building plan reviewers, building official, and City Arborist for one of the fastest-growing cities in the country (about 45k people now), and we can almost always make it next business day. We can do same day most of the time.
Sounds like you’re working in a city that doesn’t know how to manage resources.
21 panels and very simple layout. The longest part was building the frame to hold the panels. Installing the inverters etc. took a little time and our town is a little strict when it cones to construction. This is a very good installer which doesn’t rush things just to move on to the next job.
Here in Canada prices have stayed stubbornly high. It’s the Canadian way.
I have panels that I bought for under $0.50/watt that they were clearing out at the local wholesaler years ago. Haven’t been able to find anything even near that price range since, and I’m an electrician with access to wholesale pricing.
I have found some decent prices recently but they’re all on full pallet lots. So you need to be a business dedicated to solar installs to get a fair price, and those businesses obviously don’t pass the savings on as that’s not the Canadian way.
Batteries are an even worse situation! If you live here and want storage, I hope you like lead-acid.
Not like lately lately, prices were so bad for so long. Got a supplier you could recommend?
I had hoped to start by building a pack for my small car using something like b-grade prismatics or good salvage cells from batteryhookup.com.
Currently running 8kWh of lead-acid which as we know might as well be around 3kWh usable. Going to lithium would really make a car out if it, but the car itself is a weird old thing and not worth much so I don’t want to invest a ton into it.
UK its partly roof size/shape limiting the amount of panels you can get in the optimum location, partly the weather, and partly install costs.
If its going to take me 8 years at least to pay back vs. not having it I am not going to bother. Some people got lucky with lifetime buy back rates for the panels to the grid so they made bank of theirs with 50p a kwh ( and electric was around 24p a kwh to buy from the grid) but those rates got cut to like 4p a kwh, when even a cheap EV tarrif is like 9p a kwh
There are some finance deals available from the likes of Eon but its hardly high end gear, which I think is needed to make the most of the UK roofs and UK sun. Time you start paying interest on it, it becomes an even worse deal.
I would save more money by just having a battery installed and charging it on my EV tarrif overnight.
About a third of the houses in my neighborhood have gone solar. My household was one of the first to do it about five years ago and every time I go for a walk I notice a new one that popped up. Our solar system payment is about half what our electric bill used to be and we make more electricity than we use every month of the year, even with charging a plug-in hybrid car. Far from “no one is going to do it.” I frankly don’t understand why more people don’t do it.
Weird, here we got 11kW solar panels with inverter and 7½ kW battery for USD $12900,-. Installation (starting monday next week) is USD $ 4300,- complete with panels, wiring, inverter and battery including authorized electrician to connect it.
Meaning installation is only a fourth the total price. So clearly the panels are way more expensive, and that is in Denmark, where skilled workers are among the highest paid in Europe. AND on a ceramic tiled roof, which is the most demanding and expensive to have it installed on.
This is a completely new solar panel installation, which should begin next week. so prices are as they are now here.
PS:
For the above prices the hardware needed for installation is included with the panels.But I think that’s standard.
They are not rare. It is the fastest growing energy production mode and is growing faster every year.
Residential installations lag behind the commercial due to installation costs, but they are blowing up as well. I can walk around my neighborhood and see a couple dozen homes with it.
It’s also highly regional. The further south in the northern hemisphere the more common.
Where I live, power companies successfully lobbied to charge a minimum fee to people using a grid-tied system (as opposed to off-grid). So now a bill that might have been lowered to $9.00 will cost the minimum fee of $30.00 (actual example). You might say, that $30.00 is still a very low power bill but how long will it take before that starts going up? They are also lobbying to buy power from homeowners for less than they charge homeowners. This was a huge turn-off for me considering the high cost of installation. When I asked the solar installer about off-grid installations, he said they weren’t allowed to offer those. Not sure why but got the impression it was a government thing and not a company thing. Not sure.
It’s a company thing. Government can’t force you to pay for electricity if you don’t want it.
However off grid setups are more complicated and require a different design philosophy, so most solar companies don’t do them. You have to shop for companies that specialize in off-grid setups.
probably when using carbon cathodes instead of cobalt, the energy density drops from 300wh/kg to just 150wh/kg, so u would need extra anode/electrolyte mass to store the same amount of energy.i bet that those prices hikes are a result of diversion from rare earth metal mining…but just a guess
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