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I thought it was more that the money dried up, and the nuclear test ban prohibited testing of the sorts of nuclear rockets that were being prototyped at the tim
by duncan_bayne 9y ago
I thought it was more that the money dried up, and the nuclear test ban prohibited testing of the sorts of nuclear rockets that were being prototyped at the time.
- orbital-decay 9y agoIt's the same with semiconductors though, the barrier is mostly economical.
- donquichotte 9y agoIs it? I was under the impression that we are hitting physical barriers, like transistor size getting closer and closer to Silicon atom size.
- orbital-decay 9y agoIt's still technically possible to make chips with smaller nodes than the current mainstream processes allow, although this is uneconomical due to low yields and extremely thin margins.
- Dylan16807 9y agoHas the budget for semiconductor research ever decreased? It's a tautology that we could be spending more money on it, but we are deeply investing in this field in a way that we stopped doing with space.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoRight, so "Moore's law is dead" really scoped to "... affordable, conventional materials and designs that we've almost finished wringing every scrap of ROI out of". (That's not meant to be pejorative. Just saying I understand why companies would be loathe to ditch proven tooling w/ a lot of sunk costs).