[beavus]

I'm putting my bets on some brilliant new technology, or radical new idea, for safely and cheaply traversing that huge gap between combustible buoyant atmosphere and resistance-free orbit, without riding an inferno the size of a small sun. Once that is accomplished, we'll all be zipping all over this tiny solar system of ours. With incentives like the X Prize, maybe someone will figure it out.

Or maybe I'm just waiting on a pipe dream.

[BlazingArizona]

'm putting my bets on some brilliant new technology, or radical new idea, for safely and cheaply traversing that huge gap between combustible buoyant atmosphere and resistance-free orbit, without riding an inferno the size of a small sun. Once that is accomplished, we'll all be zipping all over this tiny solar system of ours. With incentives like the X Prize, maybe someone will figure it out.

Since breakthroughs in theory cannot be predicted, we need to look at the process by which such advances come about. If we are going to reach any such space utopia, it will be by the same process that led to the development of microcomputers and the Internet over the last thirty years. Nobody planned what we have today ahead of time: each set of researchers, mostly private, saw only a short distance ahead of itself to some commercial goal. In getting to each of these increments, astonishing and unknown side avenues of attack opened up - "et itur ad astra" (And we go to the stars...)