I concur with building picoballoons. It's much more economical. It's hard to recover from a malfunctioning rocket that carried your precious payload, but a burst Yokohama is just a learning lesson.
The current zeitgeist is clearly anti-plastic. Only time will change their minds. Fortunately, the healthcare industry (hospitals) will always use plastic for preventing contamination in a very economical way.
yeah but there don't seem to be conclusive studies that show that "microplastics" are a detriment at all.
You'd assume that there is a study that tested 200 people with more and less microplastic intake over a year to show that it actually has an effect, but I guess you'd have to do 20 studies to get a p<0.05...
It's the current trend in selling the fear of climate change caused by fossil fuels. People get desensitized to prior campaigns, like oil drilling, pipelines, gasoline cars, and plastic bottles in the ocean and straws in the rivers. Microplastics push the fact there's something foreign in your own body, and that's disgusting.
Martin personally gave me a tour of the factories back in 2002. I got to see first hand things being made from parts. I overheard him pitching an idea to an engineer, and then a year later seeing the product reviewed in QST. I still use the clock he gave me.
The key reason is the Coordinated part. By letting the Moon handle it's own timekeeping, it reduces the hassle of getting regular updates from Earth clocks. Earth-based atomic clocks will continue to measure its own precise second lengths and take measurements of quasars to get accurate wall-clock time. Moon-based atomic clocks can have their own separate network of atomic clocks and measure the same quasars to get the same wall-clock time.
Maybe not just that. We generally need to establish the time of events on another celestial body and process that time locally. Having separate clocks is trivial, but recording correctly sequence of events that happened a few light-seconds away is interesting, when taking all effects into account. Should we record the local time of event? The observer time (=local time+distance+gravitational effects)?
Looks like "no" but a few years ago they launched / tested the "deep space atomic clock" which seems like it'll be the basis for future space-based clocks.
