Maybe only tangentially related to SpaceX, but an amazing sign of the space revolution yet to come — thanks in large part to SpaceX for lowering the cost to get to orbit.
About the re-entry vehicle: "…we’re building like 1986 Toyota Corolla that is meant to be less than a million bucks a pop, quickly refurbished, and then shot right back into space.” How cool!
That’s great, but one part I don’t understand is the compelling advantage of growing drug crystals (from the article) in micro-g. I get that maybe they are larger & maybe fewer defects (?) but why is that important for this application?
My laymen’s thought is that Chrystal growth requires nucleation points in the solution to start it off. In uG I guess the impurities required for the nucleation would be more evenly distributed and it means that as the crystals grow they would be more uniform. Having said that, I expect they just crush it all up in to a powder anyway so maybe that’s not the case.
