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China Installed More Solar Panels Last Year Than the U.S. Has in Total
(www.ecowatch.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Let's install solar panels on the moon! That'll fucking show them. Beam the energy back to earth with giant fucking microwave dishes. Ohhh that would really piss off them damn reds
Until it’s a new moon…
Actually that raises an interesting point…the best time for solar, on earth, is when the panels are most directly hit.
So since the moon is tidally locked to the earth, that means that there would be better ideal tilts at each longitude, so that whenever the sun is out, they are tilted to receive as much light as possible. But that also means that the panels only even receive light for half of the lunar cycle, at most.
Right? Am I overthinking this?
There are craters towards the poles that receive sunlight all the time. But you'd still have to build extra panels for the lunar cycle. Equatorial stations might be better, and if you built 3, 2 would be in direct sunlight almost all the time.
Which is fine! Gives you time to do maintenance without any additional losses.
Not really…you don’t want to be out doing maintenance at lunar night. We’d have to have some serious improvement in EVA suits, mechsuits, or robots.
There’s a reason every Apollo mission landed at lunar dawn.
That's it. We'll need to invent sun lamps. Lamps bright and hot enough to illuminate and warm the Martian surface at night, to enable maintenance.
We can do it, not because it's easy, but because it is hard.
Wait what? That's an awful reason to do something.
Doing the hard thing is a learning experience.