I would say that losing the source code to some of the embedded control systems in the ISS is just about the LEAST valuable theft of source code, ever. That code is most likely extremely specialized, designed JUST for whatever system on the ISS in question, and probably had millions of dollars put into refining, optimizing, and debugging it. I bet the code is completely unsuitable for any other purpose for that reason (one way to reduce bugs is to make the code as specific as possible in a low level language).
And, whatever system we are talking about : ventilation, communications, power, water recycling : you can safely bet that the way NASA designed it is TOTALLY unsuitable for commercial use. It probably uses the most expensive possible parts, made by hand, for crucial components of the systems.
Yes, however, when fracturing goes wrong you have an underground leak of some toxic chemicals. Said chemicals are NOT radioactive, merely arrangements of carbon that can be removed from water with the right equipment. Furthermore, as long as you recognize the leak has occurred, it is straightforward to handle the problem. The ONLY reason this is even an issue is because captive regulators may NOT properly make the companies doing the drilling pay the bills when they screw up.
As you may have heard, thanks to the advances in fracking, natural gas is now abundant and will remain so for some time. Probably decades. Yes, fracking sometimes contaminates groundwater, but it isn't the end of the world when that happens. Filters, pipelines, it's just a matter of recognizing the problem and solving it.
Economically, natural gas is the way to roll at the present time. We can run our cars on it and power our houses. We can also run 18-wheelers and trains off it. The only thing that natural gas isn't appropriate for are airplanes, because it has slightly less fuel density and because airplanes are incredibly expensive.
Furthermore, at some future data, renewable solar energy may become cheap as the sand the solar cells are made from. We might be able to cover whole deserts for very little money. At that point, one easy way to store and use the power is to use it to synthesize natural gas (by electrolyzing water to hydrogen and combining it with CO2). Could get the CO2 from existing natural gas burning power plants and coal burning plants.
The CO2 from burning natural gas may contribute to global warming, but it does NOT harm the ozone layer and it does NOT give people lung cancer. Those are rather significant advantages over burning coal.
Source on your railguns comment? The articles I've seen say that at higher velocities, railgun shells will take trajectories like ballistic missiles, and thus have enough range to hit anywhere on the planet. 200 km range has been discussed.
No, because if you publish a book in 2 versions, they have to be priced the same, or one market will cannabalize sales from others. MIT has decided that whatever they are charging is what the market will bear. Nothing wrong with that.
However, in the case of sci-fi, an author can lower his price to a couple bucks and still make as much or more money per copy sold as he would earn with traditional publishing. Some premium authors who are well known won't sell their books for less than the hardcover price.
On the one hand, traditional publishing has been dying. No biggie, direct e-publishing is drastically more efficient. Books cost 99 cents to $2.99 (sometimes a buck or two more) and the author makes MORE money per copy sold that they would make with a $15 hardcover. No advances, and the author has to pay for editing out of pocket, but there's solutions to this. Several authors I know of would release a "beta version" of their stories as an ebook, make some money, and pay editors to help them make a cleaned up and improved version.
Not to mention that you can communicate directly with fans and get feedback immediately, rather than the letter writing days of the past.
However, I've also read that fantasy as a genre is far more lucrative than science fiction. Lots more sales, hence the reason there seems to be a shrinking number of good science fiction authors.
Furthermore, the dreams of the past have proven dead. The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality. Instead, it now looks like the world of the future is going to be far weirder and harder to understand than than we dreamed of. Humans are NOT going to just pack their stuff into spaceships and start colonizing the moons and local planets, then somehow cheat physics and do the same thing at other stars. (that will conveniently have worlds just like earth, with compatible biology and biochemistry but no sentient life)
In fact, a rational view of other future, one based on the current trajectories of how things are heading, is that human beings will NEVER colonize anywhere else. "Apes in a can" spaceship will never happen. Us short lived jumped up primates are too fragile and too dumb, instead we will bootstrap our way to creating entities that do not have our human weaknesses.
Neat. And for our purposes, this would allow for gigantic civilizations spread across light years linked by high speed communication systems? If you could only transmit information and energy this way, it would still be almost as useful as being able to send matter..
Suppose, for the sake of argument (I know the chances are between slim and none, I suspect that the speed limit on the universe is to prevent game-breaking exploits of the universe itself) that FTL neutrinos are possible. How fast do they need to travel before you can send messages to the past?
I was quite curious about the Beatty Chadwick case, so I looked it up. Actually, while the headlines say he had to produce the money, that isn't quite true : he also would refuse to sign documents needed to actually investigate where the money was. Had he cooperated with the effort to find the money, and no funds could be found, he would have been released much sooner or not jailed at all. Most likely, he does have access to the money somehow, and he felt that giving up his life's fortune of severald million dollars (plus 14 years of interest) was not something he wanted to do. Not that he has enough lifespan left to spend all that money : I think he endured 14 years of prison just to stick it to his ex wife.
That explains the " I'm sure that in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by. " line.
That never made any sense to me : surely Doc Brown, as crazy as he was, knew that plutonium was too dangerous to ever be sold to ordinary consumers in a residential area. But diet soda WAS sold then, if he said " I'm sure that in 1985 aspartame/diet soda is available in every corner drugstore " it would have made perfect sense.
I think it could be done. The merging might be a complex procedure, and in some cases, a personality might remain, ahem, multithreaded but you would be back to being a single, unified entity. At that point any anxieties over copy versus original would be moot.
Yes, it does, however, lasers are much hotter than chemical propellant. At least double the specific impulse, which reduces the required propellant mass by a large factor. (at least a factor of 10, however, the exact amount varies)
In any case, this propellant is just a big block of some homogeneous, nontoxic solid bolted to the bottom of the spacecraft. It is virtually free.
As long as you have the technology to eventually merge the 2 instances back to 1 in the future (causing both sets of memories to be stored somehow), it ultimately doesn't matter who is the original and who is the copy.
And the spot size problem is fine, for an orbital launch the ranges are not so high that a reasonably quality mirror can't keep the spot size smaller than the bottom of the ship.
That doesn't matter. The PERCEPTION means that everything has to cost more. Like how "medical grade" equipment costs 10x what the same stuff costs otherwise.
Yep. Though nanoscale printing solves that problem as well (since you can just print the nanotubes into the final product in an encapsulated form, without at any point exposing human workers to them in their raw state)
My point is that the tech to build a space elevator is so high tech that it's almost like saying "well, once we get a missile that can go from Germany to Britain, we'll be able to launch soldiers one by one and land them on the target".
Sure, you COULD do it that way, but it may be a supremely bad idea compared to a simpler and cheaper alternative.
Oh, no. I'm just saying that building one is possible. I do NOT think it is feasible when compared to alternatives.
Heck, if you had the manufacturing tech you needed to actually make the cable material cheaply, you could ALSO most likely make disposable rocket boosters cheaper still.
If we had molecular manufacturing : a theoretical technology that uses arrays of 3d printers able to create object accurate to the molecular level (and thus copy themselves, giving the unbeatable advantage of exponential growth), we could make carbon nanotubes in the quantity and precision needed.
But we could also use the SAME tech to convert the raw materials from expended rocket booster stages, recovered from wreckage on the ground, and convert them right back to the original boosters, every atom in the right place.
Links? Anything but your "debunked years ago" argument to offer? I really don't know, and again, even if some of my points are imperfect, to win this argument you need to do two things :
1. Show that the disadvantages to a space elevator are not as severe as I state them
2. Show that Laser Ablation is NOT at least an order of magnitude cheaper and more reliable solution.
Google for carbon nanotubes, sheesh. Or diamond. Diamond is strong enough. (and yes it IS possible to manufacture large pieces of it, just current impractical and expensive. Google for "microwave vapor deposition")
If you try to cut corners to reduce costs, OR to change the design in order to reduce costs and simply manufacturing, for nuclear parts, the POTENTIAL catastrophe is enormous. Pebble beds won't work if the pebbles aren't made right, the darn thing will melt down like any other reactor. That helium coolant will leak through the tiniest hole in the seals. And so on.
My point is, with other forms of power generation, you CAN change the design and cut corners all you want, and the worst negative consequence is that the device fails prematurely. So in the long run, I think this fundamental advantage will win out. (I'm thinking solar/wind mainly because neither is fuel-dependent)
Fair enough. Basically, the cable is always going to be stressed to a large percentage of maximum loading. It will also be made of carbon, which is flammable. I suspect that many kinds of weaponry could cause just enough damage to cause it to unravel and fail in short order. An incendiary charge placed against the side of the cable with a swarm of R/C helicopters might work just as well.
In any case, it's the ultimate in single point failure. Yes, you can attempt to secure the cable with missile defenses and other weaponry, as well as elaborate security checks of everyone allowed near it. I just can't see such an effort working when it's so trivial to actually destroy the cable, however.
Even a few 20mm rifle rounds in the same spot might be all it takes.
See my post. From day 1, another way looks like it is a LOT cheaper and easier, both per launch and overall. Google for "ablative laser propulsion" : like a space elevator, but with more lasers, and no cable.
We have laboratory samples of the needed materials. They are hard to grow, but are possible in theory.
Now, whether these materials will be PRACTICAL or not is another story. What will happen when they are subjected to constant tensile stress, enough stress to rip through nearly any known substance, 24/7 for a period of years and then decades?
Look, ultimately you can't know if a technology is a good idea without actually building the tech, full scale, and spending the time and money to create revised versions to fix the major problems.
After you do that, some technologies are still a dog, no matter how you try to hide it. Nuclear power is an instance of that : sure it works, but the risk of catastrophe overshadows everything, and means that if you try to build and run a reactor everything costs too much because of the dangers. In the long run, nuclear is not feasible because other technologies will keep getting cheaper.
I feel a space elevator is a dog for a similar fundamental reason : there's one 36,000 km high structure.
Any serious failure to a manufacturing defect along 36,000 km of cable, and you lose every last dime invested in the project. (not to mention the falling cable might cause some nasty problems). If someone ever wants to attack a space elevator, it's a perfect terrorism target. One homemade cruise missile (in 2050, I suspect making a cruise missile won't be much harder than RC airplanes are today. Heck, some garage tinkerers already have done similar projects) and the ENTIRE elevator falls.
Not to mention laser fire, railgun fire, bad weather, etc etc. There's a lot of things and it only has to fail at one point.
Furthermore, you have to complete the elevator project before it is worth anything. Invest all that money to FINISH the cable, you can't get incremental results. And this multi-billion dollar structure (realistically probably hundreds of billions) has a rather limited cargo capacity : one load of passengers a week is NOT a rapid movement to space.
So, no. It's an idea that has somehow gained traction, but it is most likely a non-starter.
I propose a much simpler idea : rather than use lasers on the ground to transmit power to the elevator climber car, scale up those laser arrays a few orders of magnitude to the point that they can vaporize propellant off the bottom of the spacecraft. Pulse the beams right, and planar shockwaves will be created, giving net thrust without any kind of nozzle.
Advantages:
1. Ablative Laser propulsion doesn't require anything in the spacecraft in the way of aerospace hardware but a small instrument package to report attitude and accelerations back to the ground. Gyroscopes for stabilization would be nice, but not essential. 2. If a laser module on the ground fails or wears out, the launch continues..10 or 50% redundancy is entirely feasible. 3. You can do one launch every few minutes, assuming you use LED diode pumped fiber optic lasers, and have sufficient cooling capacity to remove the waste heat and sufficient power generation. That could be a metric ton or so to orbit every 15 minutes, 24/7, 7 days a week. 4. You do 1000 or 10,000 unmanned cargo launches before you send the first man up in a spacecraft identical to the one used for cargo (well, with life support inside, but identical flight hardware). This kind of sampling size allows you to honestly evaluate the safety of the system. In the event of a problem, you turn the beam off instantly and deploy parachutes. (such as beam heating of the side walls or something). No rocket to explode. 5. Each spacecraft will be extremely cheap, just a block of an inert solid bolted to the bottom, and a small instrument package (an iphone has all the circuitry needed, although of course you would use more sensitive accelerometers) and a radio. Obviously, some kind of orbital maneuvering system is also needed, but you can get to orbit without it.
Disadvantages:
1. Reflected beams from the lasers might cause problems for observers on the ground. Might have to create a large exclusion zone around the launch site, with air travel forbidden in a large radius. Not a big deal, tons of places in the Arizona desert. Still, with so many people involved, it seems likely a few people would be blinded if the lasers used were visible light. 2. It would r
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I would say that losing the source code to some of the embedded control systems in the ISS is just about the LEAST valuable theft of source code, ever. That code is most likely extremely specialized, designed JUST for whatever system on the ISS in question, and probably had millions of dollars put into refining, optimizing, and debugging it. I bet the code is completely unsuitable for any other purpose for that reason (one way to reduce bugs is to make the code as specific as possible in a low level language).
And, whatever system we are talking about : ventilation, communications, power, water recycling : you can safely bet that the way NASA designed it is TOTALLY unsuitable for commercial use. It probably uses the most expensive possible parts, made by hand, for crucial components of the systems.
Yes, however, when fracturing goes wrong you have an underground leak of some toxic chemicals. Said chemicals are NOT radioactive, merely arrangements of carbon that can be removed from water with the right equipment. Furthermore, as long as you recognize the leak has occurred, it is straightforward to handle the problem. The ONLY reason this is even an issue is because captive regulators may NOT properly make the companies doing the drilling pay the bills when they screw up.
As you may have heard, thanks to the advances in fracking, natural gas is now abundant and will remain so for some time. Probably decades. Yes, fracking sometimes contaminates groundwater, but it isn't the end of the world when that happens. Filters, pipelines, it's just a matter of recognizing the problem and solving it.
Economically, natural gas is the way to roll at the present time. We can run our cars on it and power our houses. We can also run 18-wheelers and trains off it. The only thing that natural gas isn't appropriate for are airplanes, because it has slightly less fuel density and because airplanes are incredibly expensive.
Furthermore, at some future data, renewable solar energy may become cheap as the sand the solar cells are made from. We might be able to cover whole deserts for very little money. At that point, one easy way to store and use the power is to use it to synthesize natural gas (by electrolyzing water to hydrogen and combining it with CO2). Could get the CO2 from existing natural gas burning power plants and coal burning plants.
The CO2 from burning natural gas may contribute to global warming, but it does NOT harm the ozone layer and it does NOT give people lung cancer. Those are rather significant advantages over burning coal.
Source on your railguns comment? The articles I've seen say that at higher velocities, railgun shells will take trajectories like ballistic missiles, and thus have enough range to hit anywhere on the planet. 200 km range has been discussed.
No, because if you publish a book in 2 versions, they have to be priced the same, or one market will cannabalize sales from others. MIT has decided that whatever they are charging is what the market will bear. Nothing wrong with that.
However, in the case of sci-fi, an author can lower his price to a couple bucks and still make as much or more money per copy sold as he would earn with traditional publishing. Some premium authors who are well known won't sell their books for less than the hardcover price.
On the one hand, traditional publishing has been dying. No biggie, direct e-publishing is drastically more efficient. Books cost 99 cents to $2.99 (sometimes a buck or two more) and the author makes MORE money per copy sold that they would make with a $15 hardcover. No advances, and the author has to pay for editing out of pocket, but there's solutions to this. Several authors I know of would release a "beta version" of their stories as an ebook, make some money, and pay editors to help them make a cleaned up and improved version.
Not to mention that you can communicate directly with fans and get feedback immediately, rather than the letter writing days of the past.
However, I've also read that fantasy as a genre is far more lucrative than science fiction. Lots more sales, hence the reason there seems to be a shrinking number of good science fiction authors.
Furthermore, the dreams of the past have proven dead. The hopes of the atomic age and space age have turned out to be far more difficult to achieve in reality. Instead, it now looks like the world of the future is going to be far weirder and harder to understand than than we dreamed of. Humans are NOT going to just pack their stuff into spaceships and start colonizing the moons and local planets, then somehow cheat physics and do the same thing at other stars. (that will conveniently have worlds just like earth, with compatible biology and biochemistry but no sentient life)
In fact, a rational view of other future, one based on the current trajectories of how things are heading, is that human beings will NEVER colonize anywhere else. "Apes in a can" spaceship will never happen. Us short lived jumped up primates are too fragile and too dumb, instead we will bootstrap our way to creating entities that do not have our human weaknesses.
Neat. And for our purposes, this would allow for gigantic civilizations spread across light years linked by high speed communication systems? If you could only transmit information and energy this way, it would still be almost as useful as being able to send matter..
Suppose, for the sake of argument (I know the chances are between slim and none, I suspect that the speed limit on the universe is to prevent game-breaking exploits of the universe itself) that FTL neutrinos are possible. How fast do they need to travel before you can send messages to the past?
I was quite curious about the Beatty Chadwick case, so I looked it up. Actually, while the headlines say he had to produce the money, that isn't quite true : he also would refuse to sign documents needed to actually investigate where the money was. Had he cooperated with the effort to find the money, and no funds could be found, he would have been released much sooner or not jailed at all. Most likely, he does have access to the money somehow, and he felt that giving up his life's fortune of severald million dollars (plus 14 years of interest) was not something he wanted to do. Not that he has enough lifespan left to spend all that money : I think he endured 14 years of prison just to stick it to his ex wife.
That explains the " I'm sure that in 1985 plutonium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by. " line.
That never made any sense to me : surely Doc Brown, as crazy as he was, knew that plutonium was too dangerous to ever be sold to ordinary consumers in a residential area. But diet soda WAS sold then, if he said " I'm sure that in 1985 aspartame/diet soda is available in every corner drugstore " it would have made perfect sense.
Ironically, the line is funnier with plutonium.
I think it could be done. The merging might be a complex procedure, and in some cases, a personality might remain, ahem, multithreaded but you would be back to being a single, unified entity. At that point any anxieties over copy versus original would be moot.
Yes, it does, however, lasers are much hotter than chemical propellant. At least double the specific impulse, which reduces the required propellant mass by a large factor. (at least a factor of 10, however, the exact amount varies)
In any case, this propellant is just a big block of some homogeneous, nontoxic solid bolted to the bottom of the spacecraft. It is virtually free.
As long as you have the technology to eventually merge the 2 instances back to 1 in the future (causing both sets of memories to be stored somehow), it ultimately doesn't matter who is the original and who is the copy.
And the spot size problem is fine, for an orbital launch the ranges are not so high that a reasonably quality mirror can't keep the spot size smaller than the bottom of the ship.
You CAN get to orbit this way, the math works.
Unlike the space elevator concept, everything you need for a laser launch can be purchased today.
That doesn't matter. The PERCEPTION means that everything has to cost more. Like how "medical grade" equipment costs 10x what the same stuff costs otherwise.
Yep. Though nanoscale printing solves that problem as well (since you can just print the nanotubes into the final product in an encapsulated form, without at any point exposing human workers to them in their raw state)
My point is that the tech to build a space elevator is so high tech that it's almost like saying "well, once we get a missile that can go from Germany to Britain, we'll be able to launch soldiers one by one and land them on the target".
Sure, you COULD do it that way, but it may be a supremely bad idea compared to a simpler and cheaper alternative.
Oh, no. I'm just saying that building one is possible. I do NOT think it is feasible when compared to alternatives.
Heck, if you had the manufacturing tech you needed to actually make the cable material cheaply, you could ALSO most likely make disposable rocket boosters cheaper still.
If we had molecular manufacturing : a theoretical technology that uses arrays of 3d printers able to create object accurate to the molecular level (and thus copy themselves, giving the unbeatable advantage of exponential growth), we could make carbon nanotubes in the quantity and precision needed.
But we could also use the SAME tech to convert the raw materials from expended rocket booster stages, recovered from wreckage on the ground, and convert them right back to the original boosters, every atom in the right place.
Links? Anything but your "debunked years ago" argument to offer? I really don't know, and again, even if some of my points are imperfect, to win this argument you need to do two things :
1. Show that the disadvantages to a space elevator are not as severe as I state them
2. Show that Laser Ablation is NOT at least an order of magnitude cheaper and more reliable solution.
Google for carbon nanotubes, sheesh. Or diamond. Diamond is strong enough. (and yes it IS possible to manufacture large pieces of it, just current impractical and expensive. Google for "microwave vapor deposition")
If you try to cut corners to reduce costs, OR to change the design in order to reduce costs and simply manufacturing, for nuclear parts, the POTENTIAL catastrophe is enormous. Pebble beds won't work if the pebbles aren't made right, the darn thing will melt down like any other reactor. That helium coolant will leak through the tiniest hole in the seals. And so on.
My point is, with other forms of power generation, you CAN change the design and cut corners all you want, and the worst negative consequence is that the device fails prematurely. So in the long run, I think this fundamental advantage will win out. (I'm thinking solar/wind mainly because neither is fuel-dependent)
Fair enough. Basically, the cable is always going to be stressed to a large percentage of maximum loading. It will also be made of carbon, which is flammable. I suspect that many kinds of weaponry could cause just enough damage to cause it to unravel and fail in short order. An incendiary charge placed against the side of the cable with a swarm of R/C helicopters might work just as well.
In any case, it's the ultimate in single point failure. Yes, you can attempt to secure the cable with missile defenses and other weaponry, as well as elaborate security checks of everyone allowed near it. I just can't see such an effort working when it's so trivial to actually destroy the cable, however.
Even a few 20mm rifle rounds in the same spot might be all it takes.
See my post. From day 1, another way looks like it is a LOT cheaper and easier, both per launch and overall. Google for "ablative laser propulsion" : like a space elevator, but with more lasers, and no cable.
We have laboratory samples of the needed materials. They are hard to grow, but are possible in theory.
Now, whether these materials will be PRACTICAL or not is another story. What will happen when they are subjected to constant tensile stress, enough stress to rip through nearly any known substance, 24/7 for a period of years and then decades?
Look, ultimately you can't know if a technology is a good idea without actually building the tech, full scale, and spending the time and money to create revised versions to fix the major problems.
After you do that, some technologies are still a dog, no matter how you try to hide it. Nuclear power is an instance of that : sure it works, but the risk of catastrophe overshadows everything, and means that if you try to build and run a reactor everything costs too much because of the dangers. In the long run, nuclear is not feasible because other technologies will keep getting cheaper.
I feel a space elevator is a dog for a similar fundamental reason : there's one 36,000 km high structure.
Any serious failure to a manufacturing defect along 36,000 km of cable, and you lose every last dime invested in the project. (not to mention the falling cable might cause some nasty problems). If someone ever wants to attack a space elevator, it's a perfect terrorism target. One homemade cruise missile (in 2050, I suspect making a cruise missile won't be much harder than RC airplanes are today. Heck, some garage tinkerers already have done similar projects) and the ENTIRE elevator falls.
Not to mention laser fire, railgun fire, bad weather, etc etc. There's a lot of things and it only has to fail at one point.
Furthermore, you have to complete the elevator project before it is worth anything. Invest all that money to FINISH the cable, you can't get incremental results. And this multi-billion dollar structure (realistically probably hundreds of billions) has a rather limited cargo capacity : one load of passengers a week is NOT a rapid movement to space.
So, no. It's an idea that has somehow gained traction, but it is most likely a non-starter.
I propose a much simpler idea : rather than use lasers on the ground to transmit power to the elevator climber car, scale up those laser arrays a few orders of magnitude to the point that they can vaporize propellant off the bottom of the spacecraft. Pulse the beams right, and planar shockwaves will be created, giving net thrust without any kind of nozzle.
Advantages :
1. Ablative Laser propulsion doesn't require anything in the spacecraft in the way of aerospace hardware but a small instrument package to report attitude and accelerations back to the ground. Gyroscopes for stabilization would be nice, but not essential.
2. If a laser module on the ground fails or wears out, the launch continues..10 or 50% redundancy is entirely feasible.
3. You can do one launch every few minutes, assuming you use LED diode pumped fiber optic lasers, and have sufficient cooling capacity to remove the waste heat and sufficient power generation. That could be a metric ton or so to orbit every 15 minutes, 24/7, 7 days a week.
4. You do 1000 or 10,000 unmanned cargo launches before you send the first man up in a spacecraft identical to the one used for cargo (well, with life support inside, but identical flight hardware). This kind of sampling size allows you to honestly evaluate the safety of the system. In the event of a problem, you turn the beam off instantly and deploy parachutes. (such as beam heating of the side walls or something). No rocket to explode.
5. Each spacecraft will be extremely cheap, just a block of an inert solid bolted to the bottom, and a small instrument package (an iphone has all the circuitry needed, although of course you would use more sensitive accelerometers) and a radio. Obviously, some kind of orbital maneuvering system is also needed, but you can get to orbit without it.
Disadvantages :
1. Reflected beams from the lasers might cause problems for observers on the ground. Might have to create a large exclusion zone around the launch site, with air travel forbidden in a large radius. Not a big deal, tons of places in the Arizona desert. Still, with so many people involved, it seems likely a few people would be blinded if the lasers used were visible light.
2. It would r