Folding screens can certainly enabled more software based design. Its obviously a really exciting new form factor considering how prominent folding screens have been in sci fi. We all really want to have Westworld level tech. Even though we are still a ways away, its awesome to know that its becoming possible.
> Drone pilots can be put pretty much anywhere in the world so they don't need to be forward-deployed, which will probably help attract people.
Unfortunately the USAF likes to put all their drone pilots at Beale which from what I have heard isn't a very big difference in experience from Minot.
Also right now all drones are required to be full pilots and officers. This is a big factor in the shortages problem. No one wants to through the Academy and then sit at a desk flinging a joystick around. When I was in it was asked all the time why not have warrant officers or let enlisted fly drones? Brass always said no.
Getting to 37k isn't a bad accomplishment. It may not be the big number, but its still a pretty good price point. Hopefully this is the end of the chaos pricing has been the past few weeks.
I wonder if there will ever be a sub 30k car by Tesla someday. The average new car is around 37k now, so about half the market is under that.
The resolution a 10 meter telescope on Earth can make out of the moon is about 22 meters per pixel. We can yet make out the moon landing site with earth based telescope.
Making a 23 metre mark on the moon seems like a natural project for some country, then. Perhaps easier than orchestrating a soft landing.
There are lunar retroreflectors about a metre across [0] that are detectable with optical equipment, for some definition of optical. But to leave a mark that can be seen from earth - to leave your tag, or an X, or a crude drawing of a penis and testes - surely that's an urge as old as art itself.
Mars is smaller than Earth, so planet-wide radio interferometry would be a smaller "aperture" than possible on Earth. If you're talking about extending the telescope to include both Earth and Mars, I imagine that doing the interferometry over changing speeds and distances would be challenging to say the least.
The speeds and distances of the planets are well known at this point and easily predicted. By the time of establishing a permanent presence on Mars the requirements of communications would already put in place the information needed if the DSN isn't already capable of it now. The compute needed would be greater, but so would the availability of it in the future too.
I hope one day we'll construct a telescope that uses the Sun for gravitational lensing. I've seen this paper once that claimed you could use it to image surface of exoplanets directly with pretty high (for our current astronomy standards) resolution. I think it talked about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft).
