In fact, to match it you'd have to go back to the early Sputnik days of Amazing Stories and Popular Science magazine when we wrote of personal atomic helicopters and domed cities on stalks before digital processing made baud rates more important than ray guns. MEMS bring it all back. You can't help but be thrilled. It sure makes titanium laptops seem prosaic by comparison. In the spirit of this good old Atomic Age fun, we present the coolest of the potential new applications for MEMS in the style of the old science magazines.
Today there are hundreds of satellites circling the earth.
Soon there may be hundreds of thousands. The biggest problem with satellites today is their sheer cost. At Sandia National Laboratories, scientist Jerry Allen is developing new, pint-size space probes with all the power of their giant predecessors but weighing no more than a few ounces. These baseball-size microsatellites would be fired into orbit by large guns. If Allen succeeds, the night sky may soon be filled with mini probes, enough to transform global communications into a low-cost, personalized service.