this begs the question: what kind of research is done on the ISS, and would shouldn't the semi industry be looking into space as the final fabbing frontier?

When I read this stunning news about molecular beam epitaxy, I nearly dropped my HobNob.

This is a nice academic study, but I'm wondering what the point is - especially on a site like this. THIS HAS NOTHING TO DUE WITH MOORE'S LAW! Unless you think somehow this will allow an increased transistor density (which is what Moore's Law is). It could (in theory) produce faster devices - which of course is not Moore's law.

One would think someone writing about MBE, and GaAs would at least know what Moore's law is and be able to distinguish geometric scaling with transistor speed. 

Surely it'd be cheaper to evacuate a chamber mostly, fill it with Helium, evacuate that, flood the remnant with Helium, THEN begin the sensitive process (sensitive to oxidization, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, whatever) than it is to operate fully in vacuum?

And why wasn't the same technique used for all the UV capable telescope mirrors, as well? (since oxygen can degrade significantly, the reflectivity of aluminum).

Displacement of problem gasses is cheaper than a hard vacuum, every time.

A who's a jigga what?

Definitely 10 uber spod points to you for getting in as many unintelligible works in an article as possible, but really... WHAT??

Methinks perhaps the title pokes a little at German history, particularly in the past century?

I was at Johnson Space Center recently and saw the HUGE vacuum chamber where they test space hardware. The door alone is over 10m in diameter (40 feet). The NASA guys were telling me they could get down to 10 to the minus 6 torr (one millionth), so these guys getting down to 10 to the minus 15 is quite a feat. But still, NASA is dealing with a slightly larger volume.