Yeah, my first thought was the astronomical (sorry) amount of fuel that would be required for simple resupplies. The materials, labor, and expense could be mitigated by future implementations of the space elevator (liftport), but it would be an obscenely unnecessary publicity stunt.
Still, it's more likely that we'll get involved in colonization through efforts like this than gradual implementations of efficient or even practical ideas. NASA has a history of using publicity stunts as budget propellant.
If they were using symmetric cryptography correctly, it could be virtually impossible to recover any of the information without first recovering the password.
Actually, this is the perfect way to test the strength of symmetric encryption algorithms. For those cryptographers with tin-foil hats (http://www.schneier.com/essay-198.html), seeing how long it will take for various three lettered agencies to recover the data will illuminate a previously dark room containing the question, "How safe is your data really?"
It seems to me that this guy is doing the whole cryptography community a favor.
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Yeah, my first thought was the astronomical (sorry) amount of fuel that would be required for simple resupplies. The materials, labor, and expense could be mitigated by future implementations of the space elevator (liftport), but it would be an obscenely unnecessary publicity stunt.
Still, it's more likely that we'll get involved in colonization through efforts like this than gradual implementations of efficient or even practical ideas. NASA has a history of using publicity stunts as budget propellant.
If they were using symmetric cryptography correctly, it could be virtually impossible to recover any of the information without first recovering the password.
Actually, this is the perfect way to test the strength of symmetric encryption algorithms. For those cryptographers with tin-foil hats (http://www.schneier.com/essay-198.html), seeing how long it will take for various three lettered agencies to recover the data will illuminate a previously dark room containing the question, "How safe is your data really?" It seems to me that this guy is doing the whole cryptography community a favor.