Narby, man I agree, I know what the smart play is, I just don't think you can convince the general populace that were right.
The new project NASA is talking about is 109 Billion dollars over 5 to 18 years and you already hear squawking over that, and that’s less than .5% of today's national budget. Heck if we wanted to do what NASA is proposing we could spend the money and have it all operational within 2 to 3 years and the public wouldn't even notice the expense.
All this, All this crap about the expense of what NASA is currently planning is just that, crap.
My only idea on how to correct the public perception is to have a huge advertising campaign and a income tax check-off for direct spending on NASA like we do with state projects on beef/pork promotion or if you don't like NASA then do the same thing except it goes directly toward private investment.
That is the hard part.
I can't tell for sure if you're agreeing with me on the runway-to-orbit that I'm pushing, or the Nuclear rocket you're talking about. But if it's runway-to-orbit, the way to promote it is to let Rutan and his buddies keep on flying higher and faster and getting headlines. At some point a commercial and/or government critical mass of opinion will develop and we'll do it.
Having SpaceShipOne in the Air and Space Museum down the street from the Congress will help too.
The nuke rocket is a cool engineering idea, but I just can't ever see the nimbys (or the not-over-my-heads) allowing it to happen. We can't even get permission to cut down diseased or half burnt up trees without lawsuits for years, so I can't ever see such a rocket being built for generations. At least until the population gets an entirely different attitude about nuclear.