Stepan, my Russian, chemist friend and I got into one of those discussions common to rooms full of engineers: the relative benefits of the different ways to go into space. He has a very interesting theory. The mundane part is that it is cheaper to send up rockets than maintain a space shuttle fleet. The really good part is that he is against the private sector getting to deeply into making rockets for space travel.
He says, “Can you imagine, the next thing you know, we will have an atomic exchange between IBM and Cisco!”