very sad indeed Hyperbole is the pepper of interesting conversation, and I think the randomness of mentioning Velcro made that intention pretty clear. For wha

very sad indeed Hyperbole is the pepper of interesting conversation, and I think the randomness of mentioning Velcro made that intention pretty clear. For what it's worth, I'm a proponent of space as well. I just think the Burt Rutan / Richard Branson route is more likely to get people like you and I into space in our lifetimes than a government program, which by its nature sucks resources out of the economy that could be used by people like Rutan who have an actual incentive to make it affordable. NASA has had over 50 years and they've done little to nothing to bring the cost of space access down. The Scaled Composites folks, as I understand it, were able to use very very little of anything that came out of NASA (except Velcro [1]), as it was all geared towards multi-billion dollar budgets. Like you mentioned about Google being more or less inevitable, I believe Burt Rutan and people like him are inevitable (in a free market) when the time is right and the technical and capital foundation is in place. (And I'll again point out that we're still missing the only point I really wanted to make here, which is that risking other people's money, particularly when they haven't freely given it to you, shouldn't be called brave even if you personally believe it's somehow worthwhile.) [1] Velcro is actually a bad example anyway; it was invented long before the space program.