Who really cares what Scientific American thinks?

I have been working on commercial space transportation in one form or another since 1980. So far, no luck finishing a project, although I've been in on some promising starts. The technologies involved: structures, propulsion, TPS, avionics, and others have evolved at such a pace that the answer now is not the same answer I would have come up with five years ago.

The Roton ATV may be gathering dust along with the X-33, but we spent $30 million for our hangar queen, not almost $1.3 billion. And at least we got an aero engineering mockup off the ground.

Now, given all I know, and Gary Hudson's input:

At this point, it would probably take somewhere between $50 and $100 million to build something reusable that would take about 1000-2000 lb. payload to orbit, along with a crew.

Suborbital hops, maybe $20 million.

The catch is, although this is orders of magnitude less than NASA and the Big Boys would spend, there's still no plausible way I know of to raise this kind of money. All the rich space enthusiasts have their own fish to fry. Beal went off on his Big Dumb Boosters, then gave up. Bigelow is working on space station modules, and pretty much ignoring the launch problem. Branson made some noises about space flight, then faded out.

I'm rooting for one of the small guys to come out of left field and surprise us, but it won't be easy.

NASA is off trying for Shuttle II: Reusable, several stages, and huge payloads. I'm not taking any bets on something useful coming out of this either.