Europe Proposes Cheap Quantum Optics Link to the International Space Station | Hacker News Reader

Europe Proposes Cheap Quantum Optics Link to the International Space Station

technologyreview.com

29 pointsvectorbunny7 comments

Any idea what they would be testing for exactly? What behavior would they expect to be different in entangled photons at that distance?

Just testing a longer distance through the air, and testing how they pass the athmosphere.

Does this mean we will get internet on the moon, and consequentially interplanetary internet?

>Such a camera would be straightforward to build at relatively low cost and could easily be chucked into the back of resupply ship for astronauts to set up when they have free moment.

Having worked in a space agency allow me to say "AHAHAHAHAHAHA". Nothing gets "chucked" into a resupply, the best they can probably do is try to schedule it in sometime in the next five years. This won't be happening tomorrow.

Perhaps ask SpaceX to do it - they shipped fresh ice cream in a refrigerator in their supply mission...

Which was undoubtedly planned for, weighed and included in the manifests several years before launch. Not to mention getting NASA approval for being in space (lot of crazy tests), NASA dietician approval (because it's a foodstuff), NASA chemist approval (make sure nothing bad will happen to the space station if it gets somewhere). Trust me there were way too many people involved in getting that ice cream up there.

I think you might be taking everything a bit too literally and you might be way too pedantic. What they meant is that the equipment is compact and that in principle it wouldn’t be complicated or outside the capabilities of the current cargo vehicles (ATV, HTV, Dargon, Progress) to bring it to the ISS.

I also think that you can’t really compare the ISS to anything else. The ISS is not some random satellite. It has many cargo ships bringing massive amounts of cargo to it all the time (thus allowing necessarily for much more flexibility – human lives are at stake, so your cargo capabilities better be more than ample for the job, allowing for contingency plans). There simply isn’t anything like it in space.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com