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Comment by Nokinside | Hacker News Reader

Radiation environment on the moon is worse than in the LEO. Earth's magnetic field is not protecting in the Moon. It's unclear how much rad-hard they need if they don't use it for anything safety critical. Rad-hard 90nm SoC for 4G/LTE should be relatively straightforward. Or maybe they use redundancy and use already available few generation old chipsets.

Changes for thermal management and testing eats most of the budget.

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I'm sure they would need something rad-hard for the system to last any practical amount of time. My guess is that Nokia would likely subcontract some of the electronics to companies that have experience in making rad-hard versions of existing technologies like BAE Systems or 3d Plus.

Thermal management is definitely hard, but this would be pretty run-of-the-mill thermal management for most space companies. I know this still means expensive but it's not an extreme thermal challenge like the Parker Solar Probe (keep things normal temps in a REALLY hot environment) or JWST (keep a very large structure at a VERY cold temperature)

Couldn't they just bury the box containing the circuitry under a few feet of lunar soil?

Burying things is a lot harder than just dropping them in place. Normally you'd pour a concrete foundation for something like this, so you'd be doing some excavation work anyway, but on the moon there's no need for a foundation because there's no wind.

> no need for a foundation

Moonquakes do seem to occur, and although they're not as damaging as earthquakes I wonder if they're still something that engineers need to worry about.

The limited experience we have with digging on the moon suggests when you get past the initial few centimeters of dust, it is hard as a rock.

They could drop a payload of 3310's from orbit.

We don't want to break the moon in half now, c'mon.

it doesnt need to last long enough for the first permanent moon colony, just long enough to get the investors excited and bump the stock.

frankly i think a moon colony thats anything but underground is a laughably myopic idea. the delta T for the moon is pretty insane.

Maybe, but it will definitely push technology a few steps forward. Big possibility something useful will be found along the way, maybe even in not related field but still.

Delta T? Please explain. I'm familiar with DeltaV, but pretty much all the delta T usages I have seen refer to a time interval.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v

Delta T in this case is probably referring to the change between the minimum and maximum temperatures experienced on the surface of the moon. In other words, the delta between something getting really hot spending 14 days in direct sunlight with no convection to cool it down and then getting really cold spending 14 days in darkness.

Delta T (for temperature) can also refer to the delta in temperature across an object as well. One side is very hot and one side is very cold. Often used when describing problems of relative thermal expansion.

> In other words, the delta between something getting really hot spending 14 days in direct sunlight with no convection to cool it down and then getting really cold spending 14 days in darkness.

Hmm. Could a buffer (e.g. water) be used? Basically... radiate heat out of the buffer when it's cold and move heat from the device into the buffer when it's warm?

Water could work as a buffer, but so could a rock, and this circles back to GGP's original point.

Similar reasoning (with perhaps higher focus on radiation than ∆T) applies to Mars, and is probably one of the side reasons Musk started The Boring Company.

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