I concur. I don't come here often anymore, and now that I have, an ad starts playing that I can't stop without closing the webpage? FFS. That's it for me. Somegeek out.

Paul Breed was 3D printing liquid fuel rocket motors in 2010 and was test firing them by 2011. His test firings also took place at FAR, the same facility mentioned in this article.

Here is a link to Paul's blogs that (somewhat) relate to his experiments with printed engines:
Unreasonable Rocket

I believe that he beat NASA and everyone else out of the gate with this technique.

interesting, thanks for the reply. I forget that mass to an orbit is a factor of more things than thrust.

On the cost issue, I have to think his costs have been higher than expected because 1) he probably didn't really envision the massive staff and infrastructure that he is currently bankrolling, and 2) what must be spiraling r and d costs. I would guess that he is pricing them not based on cost but as high as he can and still be cheap enough to capture and grow the market.

He is the founder of a flourishing rocket company, telling us about his dreams for the future, not some paid spokesperson.

Instead of spending a few million on a PR department, he is just getting up and telling us about it himself. Who cares about a little stuttering? Grow up.

Not the most powerful? I don't follow?

quoted figures: Falcon Heavy, 53000 kg to LEO, Angara Heavy (A7V) is 'only' 40500 kg to LEO.

If the Falcon Heavy launches at all, it will be the most powerful available.

When they asked Richard Noble why he built Thrust II (his previous land-speed-record-breaking car), he said "For Britain, and for the hell of it." Good enough reason for me...

"Commoner"?! - You mean "more common". I guess you'll tell me that 'commoner' sounds betterer....

> Most alarm clocks are way less reliable,

Quote your source. I think you just made that up. Anecdotally, all my phones have been very unreliable as alarms (an iPhone's battery only lasts about 2 days for starters, so frequently goes flat). In fact on many mobile phones, the alarm doesn't even sound if you've accidentally turned the phone off or if it's battery is too low (ancient Nokia's excepted). My mains alarm has never failed - even during a 3 day power cut (it's lithium battery back up lasts around a 4 years or so and can sound the alarm even when the display is off). Many are also not daylight-savings aware resulting in the same glitch featured in this article. Many get their time off the cell network, which frequently seems to balls-up and sets your phones time to be something random while they're playing with the phone network during the night.

Only in America...

> Don't accept cookies.

RTFA

> Ok, but I live in an apartment in an old (historic, something like 117 years old so far)

Historic?! You must be American! My building was built in 1810 and has 18" thick solid walls (try getting WiFi to go through that - or a drill bit long enough to run the Cat 5 though).

But yes, we have the same problem - no dishes or even aerials are allowed on our building, so hopefully this technology will allow those of us in listed/protected buildings to get satellite-based services.

Because you can't easily use a parabolic dish which needs to be aimed accurately on a car, caravan/RV/mobile home etc. This technology could potentially make it easier to resolve the weak satellite signals which would normally require a dish, resolvable by a static antenna array which could be omnidirectional. As the article implies, it might mean that digital radio actually *works* :)

> Doesn't conduct electricity and it will cool those servers down.

Pure distilled water certainly does conduct electricity! Throw a hair dryer or toaster in it and it will go bang. The hope you'd have of keeping equipment up and running in water is to keep the high voltage power supplies out of the way. 12 and 5V lines probably won't be affected much but 110V and 240V PSUs will simply go bang the second they hit the water.