New Satellite Engine Could Use Earth's Atmosphere to Stay in Orbit Indefinitely

100km is the height where meteoroids ablate. You must mean 100k miles and even there the largest meteors start to become visible.

Indeed at the bottom tfb quotes heights of 190-250km for model calculations.

> ~5x closer than what remote sensing satellites use today and thus could get 5x the resolution for the same instrument.

I would think a bit less. You won’t get a factor of 5 decrease in atmosphere to watch through and I would guess you’d get more vibration.

Yes, the article also points out that the idea is not new, but rather that this research was focused on addressing practical problems, such as corrosion of the engine's parts.

An Alcubierre drive is not a new idea either, but if someone demonstrated one I would be mightily impressed.

That is an extreme example for multiple reasons, of course, but the point is that the gulf between idea and working thing is often monstrous. Ideas are cheap, implementation is hard.

Ideas require a ton of research to transform into reality.

It may never work then:)