You said:
"Keep in mind, J, that one of the constraints adopted for the Enterprise Project was that we would restrict our fictional technology to engineering techniques that are forseeable under our current level of scientific development."
______________________________________________________

I agree that any technology that we have right now must be developed further before we can venture safely and conveniently to the other planets in the solar system and beyond.
I can imagine that the VASIMIR or similar systems would improve the speed of travel in space, but that still leaves the atmosphere and gravity problems intact.
My idea of removing the air from the front of the craft is not totally unfounded, there is the Coanda effect that has been used in model planes and I am sure it can be expanded to larger craft as well.
It takes a little bit of imagination to expand that effect to the stage where the effect is created by using magnetohydrodynamic principles and in such a way that the air does not even touch the front of the craft.
__________________________________________________
You said:
Such speculative techniques as faster-than-light travel, inertialess propulsion, artificial gravity, wormholes, and warp drive may very well be in our future, but we really can't count on them to be there for us.
_________________________________________________________

I seem to have a very good ability to imagine such methods, I have ideas or reference frames for explaining gravity (speculative yes, but we are talking about fiction,) although wormholes and inertialess propulsion seems out of my league.
___________________________________________________

You said:
Like a poet who restricts himself to a specific and rigid verse form, such as a sonnet, this discipline will give our fiction more realism and allow us to concentrate instead on what really matters to a writer; the psychological and social aspects of space travel. This is where we should let our imagination run wild.
________________________________________________________

That area of humanity is something that you know far better than I do, so it up to you and others to imagine the storyline and characters.
My imagination seems to be limited to the futuristic hardware side of any science fiction story.
_____________________________________________________

You said:
In a future post, I will review the propulsion technologies I propose for Enterprise-class space probes. They are of course, speculative, and certainly open to debate, but I would prefer to keep them consistent with currently forseeable technologies as much as possible.
__________________________________________________________

I'm eager to read your viewpoint on the subject.

__________________________________________________________

Coanda effect