Whenever I see a breakthrough in processing like this, I always wonder how applicable it will be to space resources.
When I was at Rockwell thirty years ago, one of the projects I managed, with Ed McCullough (who died a couple years ago–NSS needs to update the page) and the late Bob Waldron was in adapting processes they’d been working on for beneficiation of lunar regolith to recover high-quality silicon and other things from fly ash. I guess it ended up not going anywhere after I left in 1993.
Reusable rockets have significant economic advantages at scale against aircraft for long haul. It’s partly because they don’t have to fight drag through the atmosphere for the whole trip.
Since day one of the epidemic practically every policy decision by government and the largely Democratic academic community has been based on lies. And those lies caused the initial response to COVID to be wrong and misguided. It was panicked, thoughtless, based on very flawed models rather than the actual data, and did far more harm than good. The later and continuing mandates requiring the COVID shots and masks to keep one’s job, to fly on airplanes, to cross borders, to even go to school or attend public events, are even more insane, based not on the now long-known facts but on lies and fear and the urge by those in power to wield that power corruptly.
It is long past time for everyone to stop buying into these lies.
What I heard last night that was new to me (maybe he’s said this before) was that it was less than a million per flight on the margin, and it could deliver 150 tons to LEO (I had thought the number was a hundred tons). That’s a fifty percent increase, and a one-third reduction in cost per pound.