Thanks for your support for asteroid and cometary detection programs. It is appreciated.

Also, I see we have reached the same conclusion on Aldrin Cyclers. Solar thermal technology is great: specific impulses nearly as high as nuclear engines, but absolutely clean and reusable.

I wish I had the time to go into your analysis of the launch market in detail, but I simply don't. But let's take your water prize example -

While its easy to engineer small rockets, if you send up small payloads, it takes an incredible amount of manpower on orbit to dock and transfer a very, very small amount of water. For that matter, if you add in the mass of the docking system, most small launchers wouldn't be able to transfer any water to ISS at all.

Further, there is already an over supply in the small launch market, due in large part to the initial failure of the Iridium comunication system and the problems with the development of the Orbcomm system. Hopefully, there will be even more small launchers becoming available as the US and Russia decrease their nuclear aresenals -

All of this is great for those wishing to launch science payloads, and the taxpayers of both countries who have had to pay for keeping up the military systems, but its going to take work to see that current small launcher manufacturers stay in business during the short period of over-supply. Using federal funds at the current time to increase that over-supply makes no sense at all.

EP