A buck a squafoot (was LEO vs GSO; colony-isolation tests)

> 2) If it should turn out that microgravity allows the building of a
> better chip. Bill Higgins wrote a song called "Home on Lagrange", sung to the tune of "Home on the Range".This wasstill back in the days of the initial enthusiasm over0-G materials processing. One of the verses went: Oh, I've been feeling quite blue, Since that crystal I grew, Got too big to get through the door, But from slices I've sold, Hewlett Packard, I'm told, Made a chip that was seven foot four. > Of course, as nice as this would be, we can't build plans around it
> unless and until it happens.
Quite so. It seems that much of the wind has gone out of the sails of the notion of materials processing in orbit. The argument has been made that most of the people proposing these notions had been aerospace people, not materials processing people. The materials people could figure out ways of doing things on Earth which might not have been quiteasgood, but wereorders of magnitudeless expense. I had pretty much given up any hope on materials processing in orbit. But I did hear one person say that even now that we've got this permanent space station available, materials scientists find that the process of getting experiments up on the station is simply too lengthy and protracted. They seemed to imply that ifanother setup could get experimentsflown more quickly and easily, with procedural modifications and refinements implemented quickly, there might be a lot more interest in this field. So who knows; some good may yet come out of this area if someone can become a better service provider than NASA.