First of all, make sure you check this response first. Like Robert says, the board has been a complete sow most of the day (no fault of Robert's I'm certain), and I have had other things going on, so I'm a bit behind.

Now, that being said:

I understand your frustration. I've been trying to get humanity off this rock for thirty years. How long have you been at it? I, and those I have worked with, have covered almost every solution for private space transportation you could think of. Gary Hudson and I were pushing single-stage-to-orbit aerospike LOX-Hydrogen vehicles, with Phil Bono's blessing, when the Shuttle was still an article in Popular Science. We've tapped the best brains in the business, some of which are even now still pounding away, fighting the good fight, in their own companies. Most of the people at XCOR used to work at Rotary Rocket.

We've done concepts for expendables, spaceplanes, air-launch, sea launch, track launch, VTOVL, VTOHL, HTOHL, and various combinations thereof. Liquids. Solids. Hybrids. Cheap nuclear(!). Scramjets. LACE. Surplus Russian engines. Surplus Saturn engines (back when there were some). Pressure fed. Pump fed. Centrifugal pump fed. Piston pump fed. Cryogens. Non-cryogens. Hypergols (yech!). Slush hydrogen. Aerial refueling. Short tethers. Long tethers. Mother rapers. FATHER rapers.

Only some of these ideas made it far enough to start building things.

I helped found GCH, Pacific American Launch Systems, and Rotary Rocket, and watched as they all sank under us not for technical reasons, but for lack of the money required to make it happen. I'm looking at a 5' x 4' piece of twisted aluminum plate, the last remnants of the exploded Percheron. The signatures of hopeful engineers are still visible through the scorching. A piece of slag from a melted engine cast into acrylic is on a shelf to my left. Next to my computer, a huge bolt, an odd color of purple, is a reminder of when I watched the Rotary Rocket high bay going up in Mojave. The structure was painted that color. Belongs to someone else now. Now I'm contracting with HMX. No stock or ownership this time...maybe that will do the trick.

You want to talk frustration? I'd write a goddam book except that I don't have the kind of memory that remembers all this kind of thing step by step and much is blurred together in my mind. I may do it someday anyway...I have a whole wall of notebooks, two full filing cabinets, a stuffed flat file, and about 18 Gigabytes of electronic files. And then there's what's in Gary's garage.

We could have been mining the Moon twenty years ago, except for the fact that NASA's job is to employ engineers and personnel, not to mine the Moon. And the first outfit an investor looks to for advice on feasibility is NASA. Guess how well that works out. How do you convince an investor you can do something inexpensively when he's been talking to an organization that will spend as much money for a 15 psi solar-powered orbiting facility with a pressurized volume about the same as a jumbo jet, as the Navy--not known for frugality itself--would spend building twenty 95,000 ton Nimitz-class nuclear powered aircraft carriers?

So chill out. I'm still plugging away on space systems to get the rest of us into space, and if I can still keep some enthusiasm after thirty years, you can handle it too.

You've got talent, but frankly, talent comes a dime a dozen. The obsessive, dogged persistence required to accomplish something until you do it or fall over dead is harder to come by.

Cowboy up.