I want to use the tax breaks in the IRA law to get us a (free?) heat pump. But I don't know where to begin. Do I need to find a HVAC contractor that can help guide us through the process,or am I on my own? Or is there a service?

Also I think my partner's recent pay raise is going to put us over the threshold for getting the full benefit. How is that calculated? Is it based on your taxable income? And if so what year?

(BTW, thank you for doing this. The actions we make today will have a huge impact on the future generations.)

And it’s fun to say!

When they not only light it red on Valentine's Day, but also have it pulse like with a heartbeat, do you find it cute or disconcerting?

The (2020) views from it look like this

Yes! There’s a ham radio on SBUDNIC. We tapped into the TinyGS network. Our specific module was the RFM96. This part of the mission failed. We also built two wide angle cameras into the front end of SBUDNIC, with the intent that we would transmit a couple potato vision quality images down from space over ham band. We tested the ever-living daylights out of that subsystem and- for reasons that will forever remain unknown- it just failed to work on orbit. We never actually heard a radio ping of any kind from SBUDNIC.

That being said, we know the satellite was alive- at least in the beginning- otherwise the sails would not have deployed.

We optimized for satellite lifetime rather than broadcast frequency. It’s totally possible that we were just never in the right place at the right time to catch SBUDNIC’s radio blast. It was set up to transmit every 10 minutes, for about a minute. The TinyGS network is pretty great, however we were broadcasting at 50mW so it was a VERY quiet signal even in the best of times. It’s not impossible- it’s been done before by other satellites- but it’s certainly challenging.

Yeah…

And then Russia invaded Ukraine about 4 months after we filed the legal paperwork cementing the name in place.

The principle stays the same though- faster, cheaper, proof of concept.

Thanks! Mia Cross (miacross.com) did the art for us.

No Ham Radio?

Why does the Empire State pretend to not celebrate Columbus Day? You light up as the Italian flag

Sputnik, right?

It's beautiful!

Oh thanks! It was a fortunate stroke of collective creativity. We didn't come up with a potato, but we did come up with something cool.

I just want to say that "SBUDNIC" is a fantastic name. Have you considered making a NASA-style arm patch for the mission? I'm picturing an orbiting potato.

Wow that’s impressive

Also, cube because cubes pack nicely. Small satellites are generally all described in matters of size as a multiple of 1U, which is a 10cm cube. So a 3U, like SBUDNIC, is 30x10x10cm.

There is actually atmosphere in space! The atmosphere never really ends, it just kinda slowly gets less and less dense. Technically, there's Earth atmosphere on the Moon, but it's just suuuuuuuuuper duuuuuuper basically-not-really-there. Also, the Sun spews hot space gasses at us constantly so there's drag from that too.

At 550km where SBUDNIC was initially deployed, there's very very little but- over the course of thousands of orbits- the drag adds up! It takes a long time.

How much time should I set aside for a proper tour of the building?

We are not the first people to do a drag sail by any means, so companies are already using this tech. The difference is that we did it faster and WAYYYYY cheaper than it's been done before, especially at the scale of a cubesat.

Our aerospace professor Rick Fleeter had access to a launch slot so 4 of us decided to spin up the project into something big. It grew from there into a team of 65+ plus students and engineers from across the world. All the engineering and fab was done at Brown by students; the multinational part of the team was our launch partner, D-Orbit, who provided a carrier satellite for the ride up to space.

How does a sail work in space where there is no atmosphere? Why a cube and not a sphere?

How long do you think it would take for companies to adopt this method? And what persuaded y’all start the project?

What are your thoughts on America really missing the transition from car centric communities to walk/bike/transit based communities in the distraction of electric cars?

Cars use a TON of energy. They are really really inefficient and the environmental impact of battery production is substantial..

I'm not promoting ICE vehicles either but I hope we can get to a country where a family has 1 or 2 cars instead of 2-4+ even in rural areas... Biking transit etc is just SO much better for land use, concrete production, energy power trip etc. I'm really frustrated that people think they are saving the planet by switching to an EV when they really aren't changing very much. The manufacturing of that EV is a lot of GHG emissions as well =\

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It’s helpful to compare where the average person’s emissions come from. Housing is the top source (around a third) and transportation is next (around a third as well). For most people, those emissions vary dramatically. Frequent flyers, especially. Because plane travel is so energy intensive, it often contributes an outsize share of one's emissions.

So even if you drive every day for a commute, flying across the country several times could swamp those emissions. So there’s no one right answer to that except to say that a few long flights equals many, many miles in a car.

How do you feel about the tonnage of CO2 that is emitted from mining operations for electronic parts not being counted towards the "green"ness of various products, specifically EV cars obviously? I'm not talking about fossil fuel consumption for drilling and transport. I'm talking about recent studies done showing the insane amount of CO2 that is stored in the Earth that is being released due to the mining operations that currently does not go into those green calculations (ie I think it is if you drive an EV for 7 years and 60k miles it's better for the environment than the equivalent ICE vehicle).

Recycling is the number one thing people say they do for climate change. And it’s great. For metals, glass, paper, and batteries in particular, you’re making an impact. But the questions is much less clear for single-use plastic (better to avoid). And other things are more important if you’re prioritizing.

As The Atlantic reports, when Project Drawdown, a nonprofit group, "analyzed more than 80 separate means that could help keep the world from passing the oft-cited threshold of 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the recycling industry’s projected contributions fell below the median, trailing geothermal power, efficient aviation, forest protection, and dozens of other actions."