🚀 go-pugleaf

>situations.  Still  I doubt that the soviets will make a major industry out of
>micrograv. crystals, but if they make a few super applications with them it

Actually, according to one report (which was quoted to me verbally - it'd
take a while for me to dig up the specific reference), the Sovs expect to
make space materials processing (primarily semiconductors) a mult-tens of
billions of rubles (whatever that works out to in billions of dollars)
a year industry, and do that within the next 10 years.
   Already they are doing a *lot* with space-grown semiconductors.  They've
had equipment for this aboard space stations for years, long before Mir.
At least some of this space-grown gallium arsenide has gone into solar
panels for the space station - possibly the stuff rejected for IC use.
-- 
"The problem is not that spaceflight is expensive,  | Alastair J.W. Mayer
therefore only the government can do it, but that   | alastair@geovision.UUCP
only the government is doing spaceflight, therefore | al@BIX
it is expensive."                                   |