Is the NSF really necessary? There might be a better way to organize science, but for the past 50 years or so virtually every US PhD granted in the hard sciences or advanced engineering has been funded using grants from NSF, DOE, ARPA, DARPA, NIH and other federal sources. Without this federal funding (or some stable and well planned replacement) there will be no new scientists.

I bought a much earlier model from this line in 2012. At the time no one came close to them in terms of weight and battery life. It was a great travel machine for a bunch of years. Since it had an HDMI port, I'm not sure if I ever used the VGA port on that machine even back then.

Is it just me or does "Vendors are currently working tirelessly to discipline supply" mean they are working tirelessly at not working?

Everyone needs a hobby ...

This is The American Journal of Physics (formerly The American Physics Teacher) we're talking about. It's an undergraduate level journal with an impact factor of 0.8. Pretty harmless way to spend one's spare time.

Google is planning to collect the personal data of everyone in all those other universes too.

That's way too much /.!

there is fully open source replacement firmware available for these systems. I'v been running it on my d-link NAS since 2012.

Exactly right. Interestingly, Albany got the first pre-prototype EUV machine from ASML back around 2008. They have a long history working with ASML doing early process development on these tools.

The only thermal conductivity in space is due to thermal (blackbody) radiation. Gold has higher relfectivity than aluminum for the emission wavelengths of a 300K (room temperature) mirror, so it will have lower emissivity and cool less A clean copper surface is actually better but would oxidize and be far worse by the time it was launched.

Is 4000 employees a "massive" company? I am glad that a medium size company took this on and was able to win.

This is a thin film technology - not a bulk crystal technology like Si. It's already used in some displays and TVs.

The most similar terrestrial instrument - SKA - is much smaller than the proposed instrument. SKA will archive 700 petabyte/year. One lunar satellite probably wont cut it.

I'm not really defending this proposal as there are some terrestrial projects (SKA and CHIME for example) that will get some of the same science for way less money. However it is very different than JWST. The wavelengths this would observe at are 10,000 times longer than JWST can see. The two instruments look at very different phenomena.

That's all wrong. You are their product. I'm unclear how their actual customers feel about their products.

Good points, but I think these problems are addressed in the real papers. As you move farther than the 500 AU minimum, the radius of the Einstein ring increases making the occulter easier (and helping with coronal distortion). The lens also has a very large magnification - this increases the number of object photons by the same factor. The real problems seem to be getting there and the blurring due to object motion at these huge magnifications.