PakledHostage

So it's a bit like ours here on Earth, standing 5.5 km tall, adjacent to the Gulf of Alaska:

Needs an inlaid chess board...

I mean for the round trip. Fly there, land, perform the mission and fly back. Depending on how they do the transfers, it could very reasonably be upwards of two years.

I don't think we'll have humans on Mars by 2040. That's only 16 years away. Before that can happen, a manned spacecraft is required that can operate unsupported in deep space for 2+ years. That does not and has never existed. Realistically, we'll have to learn how to walk first by going back to the moon in the next decade or three, then once we can walk we'll be able to run to Mars. A robotic sample return mission is still our best bet before then.

I've been on test flights where they dumped fuel merely to demonstrate that the jettison system was working. Nobody got fined. Just saying. That story is apocryphal. Just the other week, CNN went for a ride along on a B-52 and the crew happened to need to shut down an engine while near Japan. They continued the mission, flying all the way from Japan back to Louisiana on 7 engines.

So no bell-bottomed polyester tape in Voyager?

There is maritime law with respect to salvage. I don’t know the details, but maybe someone here knows a bit more? Regardless, I don't think anyone would be able to claim salvage on a fairing half when SpaceX's recovery vessel is on the horizon from where the part came down.

Off topic, but an aircraft that's over its maximum landing weight can still land. It just needs an overweight landing structural inspection done before it can fly again. (A long runway and careful touchdown helps in the event, too.) We had a few older 767s that didn't even have a fuel jettison system installed. I remember one of them needing to make an air turnback and the flight crew being seriously irritated to find out that they couldn't jettison fuel before landing, but that was on them. They should probably have familiarized themselves with what they were flying before they took off. After that, we were asked by flight ops to look at modding those aircraft to add a fuel jettison system, but the cost of the mod was deemed too high so they continued to fly without.

The difference is that people can breathe all over the world. People also don't need radiation shielding throughout most of our planet's surface. Anywhere else is going to kill us pretty much the second our technology fails. And the present-day limitations of that technology also preclude building actual desirable places to live. In the near term, any artificial habitat on the moon or Mars is basically just going to be an underground bunker, with all the associated mental health challenges that that will entail. (..."All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.")

That's kind of my point. I don’t see a colony being viable on Mars. Moon, yes. Mars, no, because the Moon has potentially useful resources (helium-3 for use in fusion reactors and ice to make rocket fuel in reasonabe proximity to Earth), while Mars has...

That's what I had tried to say yesterday. I don’t see a Mars colony as viable, other than as a sort of tourist destination for wealty adventurers. Maybe eventually it would turn into a real-world Canto Bight, but that's probably a few centuries off. The idea that it could be a colony of highly educated remote workers doesn't sit well with me, because what highly educated individual is going to want to live in a box under 6 feet of Martian regolith? Highly educated workers tend to gravitate towards more desirable places to live, with outdoor recreation opportunities, etc.

That's the thing. They would need to have something. They're not going to write new code and upload it without testing it on the ground first. Maybe they don't have actual hardware for all of it, but I suspect they at least have the core equipment. Or maybe they have a virtual machine Voyager that they can test on? The VM would have to be very high fidelity in order to serve as a meaningful test platform, so maybe they even have both a VM and a hardware reference system? (i.e. do the initial development and testing with the VM and then do the final testing on the reference hardware.) I'd sure be interested to know.

Flippant, but with a grain of truth... the colony would need to be able to supply something that we need here, but that's difficult or impossible to get here. Mining helium-3 on the moon for use in fusion reactors on Earth is the first idea that springs to mind. But then your "colony" is just a mining community in an inhospitable environment, the likes of Nanisivik. It'd be a place people would go for work, not because they dream of living there. Sure there might be some associated tourism infrastructure for people to go see the sights and experience 0.15 g... (Heck, swimming in 0.15 g would be fun - supposedly it'd be possible to leap like a dolphin or whale, depending on your physique...). But the economic activity generated by that tourism and helium-3 extraction would be a tendril of the Earth's economy, it wouldn't be a stand-alone lunar economy. Likewise, I think a colony on Mars would struggle to be able to provide anything other than a tourism experience. They'd just be a space banana republic or real world Canto Bight... people would go there for a visit and spend some money, but the colony wouldn't have anything useful to sell.

My understanding is that that's exactly what they're going to do. Just the "marking" will be done on the ground in new firmware that they're going to develop then upload. They'll need to re-write the code to work around the bad memory. Shoehorning a fix like that into a '70s vintage processor won't be easy, but I am confident they'll manage... Even if it means they have to make room by taking something of the original functionality out. And thinking about it some more, it'd be a fascinating project to work on. I wonder what they have in the way of tools to develop and test on? Do they have a full ground reference system, or do they just have an emulator? Imagine a Voyager virtual machine running on some processor, deep in the bowels of the JPL campus somewhere!

Namibia was once a German colony, so it's spoken there too. Maybe I'll get to practice my German there if I go in November 2030.