Lol it’ll be on Friday the 13th too!
I was unaware of all the excitement surrounding this object until I got a note from a relative (who watches a lot of edgy YouTube videos) telling me to keep an eye out for it.
Guess this can go here-the original thread I would have sworn we had here doesn’t come up on search (tho a couple of tangential ones do)-I was hoping another media outlet would have the story (I also don’t want to link a video), but for now you’ll have to deal with the Scientific American paywall:
How a Billionaire’s Plan to Reach Another Star Fell Apart
Yes, Breakthrough Starshot, the idea of propelling a bunch of tiny probes via a superpowered laser to Alpha Centauri, is now moribund. The tl;dr is that while the basic idea may be sound in the long run, the current state of the art for the tech required isn’t going to get her done anytime soon, AND there were political concerns around building a possible superweapon.
I bet the thread you want is this one:
'the Cygnus supply ship was docked after a glitch prevented robot arm capture. No actual defect, just a software adjustment.
A not quite successful test of the booster stage for Firefly Aerospace’s next Alpha rocket:
China is going to try to put up a space based solar power system. You, know beaming power back to Earth. Here’s an analysis of why it won’t work.
It does say some stuff about SpaceX Starship, which some here may find interesting.
However, most of the article is on how any space-solar-power system will not be cost effective until launch costs drop by at least an order of magnitude.
So is the concept of Starship having an airliner standard of turnaround now officially dead? Or is that just pessimism on the part of the writer?
ETA: I’m glad the author acknowledged that geosynchronous power was never considered viable without in situ manufacturing in space like the famous O’Neill concept.
Another thing I meant to highlight in that article is this (emphasis mine):
Provided of course that some practical solution to the ground-based intermittency problem comes to pass. Which admittedly sounds less challenging than building an entire space-based industrial infrastructure.
Instead of beaming power down as microwaves, what about large orbiting reflectors that would beam plain old light down 24 hours a day to isolated locations where solar farms would be built? Simpler technology in space, no worries about frying birds and planes in flight, etc.
Might be tough on life forms that depend on a district day/night cycle for various reasons.
Yeah, about 30 seconds after posting that, I thought of a bunch of objections, the most significant of which is that if you get sunlight in a given location eight hours a day on average, the space project has to cost less than three times the price of the ground-based solar farm, or it would be cheaper just to expand the farm by 200%. Getting light 24 hours a day, vs 8 to 12, just isn’t enough of an advantage to justify the enormous cost and complexity of a space-based system, even if it’s just reflecting sunlight.
Unless you significantly increase the intensity over natural sunlight, in which case you would probably get a bunch of ecological problems such as you suggest, and add to global warming, as well.
Martian flight video from Physics.org
Take a flight over the Martian surface with the Mars Express orbiter
Thanks for this. I’ll show my kid. The narration is helpful, explaining the likely events that produced what we see (e.g., a flow of water 3 billion years ago).
If only there was a way to economically beam the power of the Sun to Earth.
Yeah, but that takes eight minutes. Too slow. 
People have this strange idea that solar power is incredibly rich and just waiting to be harvested. In fact the energy density of sunlight is quite modest: on a clear day with the sun directly overhead, about one kilowatt per square meter, less under suboptimal conditions; then multiply by the percent efficiency of solar panels. One cited real world figure is 150-200 watts. Virtually any other alternative has higher energy densities. Gathering solar power is the equivalent of harvesting specks of coal by hand with a pair of tweezers. And of course it cannot provide a 24/7 base load like on-demand power generation can. It’s not useless, and there have been huge increases in cost-effectiveness since the technology was introduced in the 1960s for space applications. But the industry wouldn’t be viable if the solar panel factory itself had to run 100% on solar power.
Big news for Soundgarden fans if true.
True. But assuming decent infrastructure to move large amounts of power transcontinental distances with reasonable losses, it becomes more plausible to build solar farms tens of miles on a side out in the arid parts of the US where land is cheap, clouds are rare, and people are few.
For darn sure the lifecycle cost of a MW-level solar array laid out on the ground is a fraction of trying to orbit and maintain a much smaller array up there and somehow beam the power down here.