I understand Germany is dense, but you definitely have some open land. The threshold to make rooftop solar the most efficient approach is incredibly dense, pretty much constant dense urban sprawl for an entire nation. Solar installations can replace a field, but a single field can replace entire neighborhoods worth of rooftop solar.

The point I am making is that the distributed infrastructure required, awkward installation geometry and therefore overall inefficiency means that rooftop solar is about 50% less “useful” compared to the equivalent panels in a grid scale facility.

If society would buy in to solar in general then larger grid scale installations like these would make much more sense than distributed panels on housing. There are a lot of roofs to put solar panels on, but there are a lot more efficient implementations.

Grid scale installations are significantly cheaper to maintain/install, can actually be installed in optimized geometries and stop people getting all pissy about curb appeal.

I would be great if people could buy a few hundred square feet of solar panels in a floating solar farm rather than putting solar on a roof.

This is definitely not to say that adding solar to a roof is bad, it is just suboptimal.

If society would buy in to solar in general then larger grid scale installations make much more sense than distributed panels on housing. There are a lot of roofs to put solar panels on, but there is a whole lot more open land.

Grid scale installations are significantly cheaper to maintain/install, can actually be installed in optimized geometries and stop people getting all pissy about curb appeal.

I would be great if people could buy a few hundred square feet of solar panels in a solar farm rather than putting solar on a roof.

This is definitely not to say that adding solar to a roof is bad, it is just suboptimal.

Apologies, I assumed you were talking fusion. Either way the exact same arguments apply. Fission is still necessarily much more mechanically complicated than solar and will never be as reliable or maintenance free. I am also not sure how you are considering nuclear safer than solar, but in the long run the safety stuff gets solved either way so I wouldn’t hold that against either technology. Carbon neutrality is also a very complicated question, environmental impact is a difficult if not impossible thing to holistically judge.

Either way, there will always be situations where solar is a better energy production method than any kind of nuclear, and there will always be situations where any kind of nuclear is better than solar. As the technologies develop that crossover point will swing back and forth.

Everything is relative. It is unlikely that fusion will ever be as scalable or reliable as solar. Solar panels are so incredibly simple that they will always be more efficient than fusion in certain circumstances. That being said, it is possible that fusion would be more efficient in different circumstances where high power density is required or solar suffers from environmental issues. One is not better than the other, any more than a carrot is a better vegetable than broccoli. They are both good. For better or worse solar is shooting up the maturity ladder much faster than fusion, but fusion will get there eventually. (I hope)

Oxygen and water (and to a lesser extent carbon) are very unique in the universe in terms of the convenience of reactions and processes that are easily cyclical. Water has some great properties that help with fundamental chemical processes that aren’t found often elsewhere.

I don’t understand the argument here, but just for clarity shooting down a small drone is much easier than shooting down an ICBM in the terminal phase.

But the first launch of a new variant rocket (which this was) is notorious for mishaps. So many things are practically impossible to test without actually launching the rocket.

I mean, I am not a Russia apologist, but space junk impacts are pretty random. I don’t think any other spacecraft are particularly well hardened to impacts like this and it seems to me just a random incident of bad luck. I am not an expert though, maybe US craft are hardened?

This technology is not applicable to residential use, this would be for things comparable to the main interstates of the internet rather than the residential roads that actually get you to your house. Starlink benefits from this technology because the major base stations where the satellites bounce your individual connection can be more efficient and cheaper.

How long until it actually breaks the ground? How long until it de-orbits?

My favorite factoid about DART is that the impact was significantly more energetic than if they had literally made the entire impactor out of TNT, landed it on the asteroid and then blown it up.