The materials question is interesting to me because my Masters is mostly related to Material Science. My thesis advisor did some research in this area--mostly with ZR3AL as I recall. My thesis was with a related material (NiAl) for potential uses related to turbines. The aluminide alloys never really worked out for a variety of reasons. My advisor ended up pretty much doing water ice-related research full-time (which he had just started doing when I was a grad student) and that's pretty much what he spent his career doing. The US Army has? a lab in Hanover NH and, at the time, they were very interested in better understanding the properties of ice, in part, presumably because of the possibility of a land war with the Soviet Union in Alaska.