Mkisofsky

Yessir. You and I are in complete alignment. Dawn was amazing for what it was. Most importantly, there was a tremendous amount of good science done, but, man, "pulling out' of orbit of one body and moving to orbit another one gave me chills. This is, precisely, where we want to be. But, "We need more power!" in the words of a fictional guy that I suspect that you know. For now, I'm less concerned about getting to LEO with chemistry than I am just continuing the development of non-chemical propulsion beyond LEO, as it seems like you are as well, for tons of reasons, not the least of which is getting humans to interplanetary destinations before cosmic rays mess them up too much. We'll solve the ground-to-LEO problem when we can, but if we can get enough stuff to LEO to enable manufacturing outside of the Earth's gravity well, we're in a different, and much better, zone, one where we can use chemistry just to fling the "meatware" to LEO, where they'll pick up heavy-ass "busses" wherever they need to go...

Honestly, it strikes me as being odd that we are still doing deep space missions (well, the "deep space" part, anyway. I don't see a practical way to get to LEO or higher without chemistry on some level) without some form of propulsion that doesn't involve chemistry. I kinda liked the JIMO mission design (but abhorred the assembly plan), even though it was underpowered... It would've paved the way for a lot better stuff, I think.

Ain't that the truth. I have a hardware graveyard of ultra-portables that I picked up in Japan over the years, juuust in case I ever need any of them again someday. I'm really looking forward to trying this one. It's been years since I've had anything that I was happy with. Due to the aforementioned unique functionality, I'm going to leave the SteamOS in place but am going to try to multiboot it (with GRUB2 if I must, depending on how much of the multiboot functionality is available via the bios and a USB-C connected SDD if I can get it to work well enough). These days, when I'm on the road, actually needing to boot windows is seldom necessary (I'm retired), but often helpful in certain circumstances, so I might have a bit more tolerance for some clunkiness than some do! BTW, this is allegedly <cough-cough> for my age 7 son, but he often needs technical help <cough-cough> of the sort that only I can provide <cough-cough>. シ