To understand this, you have to know that long before Rotary Rocket, and long before the current crew of private launch vehicle companies, while the current crop of entrepreneurs was still working out of their garages, Gary Hudson was pushing private launch systems, and like most pioneers, getting most of the arrows.

He was instrumental in reviving Phil Bono's old SSTO concepts, and drove much of the SSTO thinking in early days that led to things like the DC-X. The Phoenix was the most famous of these ideas.

I started out working with him in the 1970s, and am still working with him today. I've been at this a LONG time, and not a few of the current players used to work for us back in the old days. I wrote a newsletter on private space for several years.

Actually, Gary has a tendency to favor Hawaiian shirts rather than Indiana Jones stuff. Ironically, in the book, Gary shows some other people a tall, cone-shaped Phoenix in a large hangar in Mojave. The Rotary Rocket ATV is sitting in a hangar in Mojave right now.

"Fallen Angels" can be downloaded for free, and legally, at Baen Free Library.

Usually, real people are thinly disguised in Niven/Pournelle books, like the SF writers in "Footfall."

I actually made it as a "guest star" in Victor Koman's "Kings of the High Frontier," which I did a little technical advising on. Name in the book was "Thom Brodsky."