Nope. You cannot achieve orbit without a second burn/speed change outside the earth's atmosphere. (Yes, I know, *whoosh* and so on...)

Well, for one thing, electron microscopy is a destructive process, so if you actually want your sample back, you will likely use light microscopy. Also, electron microscopy cannot capture a moving thing (a living cell, for example), as it takes a lot of time and goes "pixel by pixel", instead of capturing a whole frame at once. I'm sure there are a lot of other reasons why light microscopy could be far more practical.

They did, in my country. And our destiny as a nation became tied to the whims of a handful of super-powerful idle parasites.

That could prove to be even more complicated.

The goal stays the same: validate or disprove predictions of physics at energy levels never before achieved.

Now imagine an audience that actually appreciates the "bullshit conversation".

I thought this was a peculiar statement. Either the theory predicts such objects or it doesn't. If it does, then there's no need to change them once their prediction is found to be right...

SpaceX is not just a "lift" company. Elon Musk has planned to go to Mars since the start, so it may be reasonable to expect that they will do some testing on the moon before that.

100 km is kind of an arbitrary number. I have a better definition, though: if you can get there in a baloon, it's not space.

(making an account on slashdot just to get my parent comment noticed.)