Yes this helps with positioning and orbital decay. Almost every satellite has this, it isn’t special to Starlink stuff. I know Elon makes it sound like they’ve invented the wheel here, but much of what they do has been done in one way or another.
There are a couple of factors which impact the lifespan of these satellites:
Technological progression. As they refine the technology and techniques they need to update the satellites with the latest and greatest. This means of course removing the old satellite and replacing it with a new one. Especially in the early days (now) this is a huge factor in replacing their stuff.
Failure rates. This is mostly due to radiation, but may also be due to other factors. The network is only as good as its nodes, so failing nodes need to be replaced fast. Radiation hardening is expensive and usually adds weight. This is a trade off between launch costs, the number of satellites they can fit in a Falcon 9 and lifespan of the stuff. Things like solar storms can have a huge impact, as Starlink found out the hard way.
Fuel consumption. Exact positioning is important for Starlink and with their VLEO orbits drag is a big factor. The satellite have very cool engines that help them stay in place, but only a limited fuel supply. There is a safe minimum fuel as regulation requires them to de-orbit safely, which takes a lot of fuel. So just running it till it’s empty is a no go, they need a good safety margin. They also don’t want to start any kind of Kessler syndrome kind of deal, so old spots need to be cleared out before new stuff can go in.
There are other factors, but these are the big ones. Starlink say they are aiming for a total replacement every 5 years, but in practice it’s more like 3 years. This is mainly due to the first batches being more prototype like, getting nearer to a final design recently.
With the proposed 11.000 unit constellation and the 5 year replacement rate, they would need more than 1 Falcon 9 launch each week. The costs are literally astronomical and the revenue has been only a fraction of what Elon sold the investors. I would be surprised if the plug is pulled on the whole Starlink thing.
People seem to think Starlink is the first and only one to try this, but it has been tried for decades and almost all have failed. The only success is with companies targeting niches, where there is little to no competition and premium rates can be had. For example reporters in the field broadcasting from a van to a satellite to be live on TV was a big niche. So far Starlink hasn’t delivered on a lot of the promises made by Elon and is destined to fail unless something big changes.
Well Starlink is yet to turn a profit, so I’m not sure it has any place to actually exist. I think it’s mostly there to fill up the SpaceX launch schedule. Especially since the Starlink stuff de-orbits in like 3 years, so they have to keep on launching.
You should absolutely wash everything you intend to put in your body. Not only are fruits and vegetables covered with things like pesticides, even when they are totally organic, they were probably fertilized with nitrates which are bad to ingest (and organic pesticides are a thing and not good for humans). And even if that isn’t the case, they grow those things outside like on the ground. There is a reasonable chance at least one animal has pooped or peed on them.
It’s the temperature, a lot of chemistry doesn’t work at higher temperatures because everything is too unstable. There is simply too much energy messing things up. This is why having a surface temperature that allows for liquid water to be present is such a good indicator for life. A lot of chemistry for life as we know it works at liquid water temperatures and water does play a big part as well.
The pressure would be less of an issue, there is plenty of life on Earth that thrives at huge pressures.
I’m pretty sure life on Earth evolved at the surface (or even in the atmosphere, it is thought lightning plays a part) and only adapted to use the vents later on. I’m not sure life could get started at those volcanic vents.
I really don’t see how. Yes there is life at undersea volcanic vents on Earth, but they don’t live like in the vent itself. It’s where the temperature gets lower there is life.
As far as I know nothing can survive boiling temperatures for long and Venus has been way above boiling for millions of years. There are extremophiles that survive a little above boiling, but 400+ degrees I really don’t see how.
There is a chance in the atmosphere where there are parts with reasonable temperatures and pressures. But there is also a lot of acids floating around, which is sorta incompatible with life. If some photosynthetic life was present in the atmosphere, floating around and living on sunlight, we would have seen it by now. There would be seasonal blooms, similar to plankton in the oceans on Earth.
It’s cool to think about and I remember reading old sci-fi with Venus as a forest planet, since it’s so like Earth in a lot of ways. But in reality it’s dead dead.
Same for Mars I feel like. We might find indications life once lived there, which would be a huge deal. But as far as actual current life, I think chances are slim to none.
That’s one way of detecting exoplanets, but not the most common one.
There are a couple of ways we can detect exoplanets:
We can see a wobble in the position of the star, as the star and the planet orbit around their common center of mass, which is offset from the center of mass of the star due to the mass of the planet.
Another way is to observe the light from a star, as the planet passes in front of the star some of the light gets blocked by the planet. By measuring the time and amount of light blocked, we can tell a lot about what is doing the blocking. The benefit of this method is some light passes through the atmosphere of the planet (if it has a significant atmosphere), by analyzing the spectrum we can tell what the atmosphere is made from.
We can also literally see a planet by direct observation, by blocking out the light of the central star, we can see light bouncing off the planet and observe that directly. This is hard, but has been done with several exoplanets.
The Milky Way galaxy is “only” 100.000 light years across, so any planets we see around stars in our galaxy we would only see about at most 100.000 years in the past. So it would be very unlikely there would be detectable life now, where there wasn’t 100.000 years ago. And even if there were, it wouldn’t be complex life.
The most distant exoplanet we’ve found to date is 27.710 light years away, so we see that planet as it was 27.710 years ago. We’ve had humans running round for at least a 100.000 year on Earth, so if there are any aliens on that planet we would see them.
Almost forgot the mandatory XKCD reference: xkcd.com/1342/
Not really I’m afraid. ReactOS is focused on implementing the old APIs which allows software that used those APIs to function.
But my experience with old proprietary software from that era is that they were trying to do something which was hard at the time. So they wrote their software with lots of clever tricks and hacks, to make the thing do the thing. This can be as simple as manually invoking interrupts and using undocumented APIs, to setting up non protected memory and communicating with the hardware directly.
I’ve seen cases where the software would only run with a specific version of Windows 95 and only with specific chipsets. Even changing the cpu from an Intel to a Cyrix for example could cause issues.
I was involved as an intern with a project to fix something like this a long time ago. We chose to simply reverse engineer the hardware interface, put in a custom controller to handle it and write modern software. It took a lot of doing and we lost some features, but the original system was beyond saving.
As time went on more and more hardware abstraction is applied, so I would hope this issue would be fixed in the future. But the whole of the 90s and early 2000s is a big issue.
I imagine a real life remake of Aladdin where a thief kidnaps a rich girl and gets her hooked on opium. They lay in the drug house on a filthy carpet, out of their minds on drugs. A flee infested monkey eats scraps off the floor and yells at them. The thief forces the girl into slavery, always chasing the next high. Until the thief tries to blackmail the girl’s father. But the father’s business partner finds out and under brutal shariah law the girl gets beheaded. The thief is locked up and goes insane inside the dungeon, he talks to a blueish rock vaguely shaped like a man until he dies from dysentery.