USB-C is better than A in that it works in two orientations instead of one, but the correct answer for connectors should be any orientation — the best connectors are cylindrical connectors: barrel plugs, RCA, BNC, banana, phono, TRS, TRRS, etc. Just make them round.
Would it be practical to have a round port as a universal connector? USB C uses a lot of pins, how would that work? Like an audio plug with a lot of rings?
I think it would be practical with glass fibre. Two wires/rings for power, and fibre for data. Something like a Mini-TOSLINK, but even smaller. Ideally the plug would be barely thicker than the cable.
> Elon Musk is a smart salesman but that's about it. He has little deep knowledge in a lot of what he does.
No, I think it's the opposite — he's extremely knowledgeable about engineering and science [1], but quite hopeless at social things. If he was ignorant of technical stuff then SpaceX and Tesla would not have succeeded, and conversely if he was a good salesman he would have foreseen how badly his political actions would hurt Twitter and Tesla.
It's quite foolish to think someone is stupid or ignorant just because you don't agree with their politics.
He's been on public twitter calls before and his engineering knowledge is pathetic. I'm sorry but he's not knowledgeable about engineering or science, he's marketable about those things. People conflate the two often, but one will fall apart like a jenga tower the moment you push it even a little.
And a bunch of out of context quotes from folks that are either buddies with him or don't know shit is not convincing.
If you think of 'tech' as computers and the internet, then yeah, it's hard to be optimistic. It's no longer the shiny new thing and has become boring. But it's an overly limited view of tech.
I think one of the reasons people are drawn to Elon Musk (despite his political views) is that he's an optimist, with big goals and vision. Self-driving cars, reusable rockets and cheap space travel, cities on Mars, etc. Even if only some of it becomes real it will be amazing. So no, not a pessimist.
I noticed that when my kids were little they could use cassette players well before they could read. They would choose music based on the pictures on the cassettes and the covers. We had a (clickwheel) iPod for our own music, but they couldn't work it because they couldn't read the text-only interface.
That's just stupid. Why send them all that way just to put them on a rock, in orbit around a planet, when you could leave them in a free solar orbit?
Not only that, but put them on opposite sides of the sun FFS, so you don't have to wait half an orbit (15 years, in Saturn's case) to get the other half of a measurement.
Station-keeping problem: Free-flying telescopes need constant propellant for position/attitude control. Over 30 years at Saturn, this is mission-ending. Surface installations sit on bedrock - zero propellant, infinite operational lifetime.
Baseline precision: Interferometry requires sub-wavelength distance knowledge (nanometers at 600nm). The paper uses active laser ranging between surface installations to achieve this. Free-flying spacecraft would need the same laser ranging system PLUS propellant PLUS attitude control. Surface mounting eliminates two of those three requirements.
Opposite sides of the sun doesn't work:
Solar orbit puts them in Earth's orbital plane, so Earth is rarely aligned for both simultaneously
The Sun itself blocks line of sight for large portions of the orbit
Solar radiation pressure and gravitational perturbations constantly change the baseline unpredictably
You lose continuous observation capability
The "half orbit wait" critique misunderstands the design: The Rhea-Iapetus baseline changes by <1% over the 79-day period (Section 2.3). Laser ranging tracks this continuously in real-time with nanometer precision. You're observing continuously with a precisely known geometry, not waiting for anything. The slow, predictable variation is actually advantageous - it provides multiple baseline orientations for the same target.
Power budget: 20 MW transmission power requires megawatt-class nuclear reactors. Much easier to mount on a surface than on free-flying spacecraft.
The surface installation trades mission complexity (landing, drilling, deployment) for operational simplicity (no propellant, stable mounting, unlimited lifetime). For a 30+ year mission, that's the right trade.
I don't get it. Nobody blinked twice about getting into a car with a total stranger before Uber either — taxis have been around for well over a hundred years. It's not exactly a huge cultural change, just more efficient and convenient.
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