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Glass In Spaaaaace
AnKsT wrote to mention an article on NASA's site about creating and manipulating glass in space. From the article: "In microgravity...you don't need a container. In Day's initial experiments, the melt--a molten droplet about 1/4 inch in diameter--was held in place inside a hot furnace simply by the pressure of sound waves emitted by an acoustic levitator. With that acoustic levitator, explains Day, 'we could melt and cool and melt and cool a molten droplet without letting it touch anything.' As Day had hoped, containerless processing produced a better glass. To his surprise, though, the glass was of even higher quality than theory had predicted."
The only reason he wants to create glass in space is to one day fashion a giant magnifying glass in space. After calibrating it on ants, he plans to bring the world to its knees.
God spoke to me.
It's a good thing they figured out a way to make glass in space. Maybe now they come overcome the titanic production hurdles involved with producing glass here on Earth, and bring down its astronomic cost.
Only a few serious answers so far, but do you realize how important this kind of work could be? He has proven a concept. Now it is much more likely for a corperation to invest in space stations to build their products. I'm not saying it'll happen within the next year, but that is it closer. Now corperations will feel the investment is less risky with much more payoff. Can you imagine having your CPU made with the parts so much more pure then they are now? Engineers could build smaller chips because they wouldn't have to account for the impurities that naturally come in the materials.