"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

Key words spelled out right in the constitution at least here in the US are "Authors and Inventors" and "limited Times", both of which appear to be FAR beyond the veil here. The artists have been dead since 1946 and no one with their head screwed on straight wound consider over a hundred and twenty years to be a "limited time" especially when you take into account that at the time the constitution was written you considered yourself lucky if you lived into your 40s.

Hopefully this thing is just a proof of concept, any such system should be able to capture multiple pieces of debris whereas this this thing seems physically limited to capturing a single piece of debris and deorbiting. That simply is impractical with over 19k pieces of debris over 3.9 inches in size to launch a satellite for each and every one. Even if each satellite had the fuel and storage to capture 100 pieces of debris that would be around 190 satellites. A better concept might be to have a couple dozen LARGE satellites (Delta IV or Falcon Heavy) in different orbits each with a dozen or so retrieval craft that go out and collect a few pieces of debris and then return to the mother satellite and drop off their debris and refuel for another trip. After the mother satellite is either out of fuel or full of debris it deorbits itself along with its retrieval craft.

I may be reading from some overly cheerful sources but from what I understand the air cooler system was the only real technological hurdle needed to make the SABRE engine viable and it's been tested and proven. No doubt a full prototype engine will need to be built and flown to confirm the engines performance characteristics and viability but beyond that it appears to be "simple" aircraft design/development. Expensive no doubt, but not all that different from developing an advanced airliner which are usually in the $10-15 Billion range.

Who knows, maybe they'll be able to get Skylon up and flying. If that happens they'll be giving rides to the rest of the space-fairing nations. A long shot I know, but beyond SpaceX it is the only fully reusable orbital launch system in some form of active development that has some physical hardware built and tested and no fancy new "10 years out" technological requirements.

Maybe its just me but I found that article to be less than useless. Their company site may read like a commercial brochure but it seems quite a bit more informative about the actual technology.

http://azurawave.com/

I don't think 'anomaly' or 'problem' are the words I'd use as there is at times humorous attempt by agencies/contractors to use such terms to describe totally catastrophic failures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As a thought experiment perhaps, but when factoring in real world requirements such as disposal, transportation, labor & logistics you're hard pressed to justify a major effort to replace bulbs wholesale.

The Model S may be in the same price range as other cars in its class but at ~$80K its way out of the ranger of your average person. Most people are looking in the $12-$30k new range. The battery packs alone are around $8-12k for all electric vehicles which is reflected in the price differences in ICE/Electric vehicles. A Ford focus for example runs about $17k in an ICE setup but even with government help runs $29k in electric. The issue of course appears to be the battery packs, they're just too expensive and probably have serious longevity issues (5-10 years). The best thing we can probably do at this point is a middle of the road solution, much smaller battery packs (7-25 miles) with a small gas engine that runs in an on/off fashion at its most efficient RPM range to keep the batteries above say 20%. That would be at least enough to take a big chunk out of our petroleum usage and begin moving us away from ICE engines to electric powertrains so that when we do find a battery technology that works the transition will be much easier.

"but PEPCO insisted that they didn't have enough data"

This situation sounds like a serious conflict of interest where the utility has at the very least no incentive to work towards LED street lights and could very well actively attempt to prevent such a switchover. Street lights by their very nature operate at night, a time where the system load has for the most part has dropped below the utilities baseload capacity. In simplistic terms they are generating power that isn't being used, so they aren't being paid for it. There is a significant impetus for them to WANT "someone" to use power in the midnight to 6 AM period and they're probably hoping that municipalities with power hungry street lights and homeowners with "security" lights will take up at least part of the slack.

A better methodology might be to simply stop buying standard bulbs and start buying LEDs. As standard bulbs go out swap them out. Sure you won't see the savings immediately but you also won't throw away a boatload of perfectly good bulbs and you won't have quite such a sticker shock. I can definitely see the use of this leasing service, but only in cases with especially pigheaded bureaucrats, kind of like those ones who claim the world is 7,000 years old or those who think we can convert 100% to renewable electricity and organic food and not have rolling blackouts and half the population starving to death.

You could, but why would you? It wasn't the most efficient engine (around 263 Isp using RP1). The SSME is far more efficient (~452 Isp using LH2), though it is wickedly expensive at about $40M each. There are several other engines would be far more efficient, cost far less overall and be more reliable.

"They could not build the telescope there."

Why? Because a small subset of religious/environmental/cultural zealots don't like it? I suppose all of the world should have just gave up on the heliocentric model when Galileo was convicted of heresy for postulating findings based on observation instead of reading religious texts? I suppose we should give up on teaching evolution in public schools because it offends the sensibilities of a small percentage of parents religious beliefs. I'm not saying that significant efforts shouldn't be made to avoid offending as many people as possible, but there are very few places on this planet where these kinds of things can be built and a very small part of one of many historical/cultural sites isn't an unreasonable thing to ask. "Just don't build it" is about as unacceptable as saying "don't challenge doctrine".

"don't get 105 degrees C"

Yes, but unfortunately most materials don't go straight from solid to liquid. Think chocolate, at 75F it usually is perfectly solid, at 85F you might get a little on your hand but not bad and at 95F it may hold its shape but will practically fall apart in your hand. ABS plastic is probably similar. Sure it may turn to liquid a 220F and be pretty solid at 90F, it may be seem pretty decent at 110F-130F sitting on a shelf but it could be wearing pretty quickly if being stressed because it is semi malleable.

"The position that nobody's religious views should ever matter"

You don't know much about this case do you? Each site apparently has to be blessed, there are reams of paper work for cultural and "environmental" considerations that in TMT's case took over 7 years to complete. The proposal has cleared several court challenges. As I mentioned there has been a agreement to remove several telescopes and it has been mentioned by others that there are some rather crazy requirements (plastic sheets below parked trucks) to try to appease these people and its apparently still not enough. I don't know what more could be done.

There are over a dozen telescopes at the same site where they intend to build the TMT, some of which have been there since the late 60s. Their complaints that their "most sacred site will be desecrated" seem to be a bit late. I think there has already been an agreement to remove quite a few of the current telescopes to revert a significant portion of the site to a more natural state. There is another larger mountain on the same island, something tells me if they began building telescopes on that mountain it would suddenly become a "most sacred site". This to me smells much more like a NIMBY group using vague religious/cultural references to try to get there way.