NASA spends a billion and can't fix the problem of foam dropoff. Give me a billion and 3 years (and exemption from the Disabilities Act and some other imbecilic restrictions) and I'll have a 700,000 pound GLOW reusable that will put at least 5,000 pounds in orbit per trip, and be able to make 10 trips a year for marginal costs linearly related to the cost of fuel. Give me $3 billion and I'll have a fleet of the damn things. Once they're flying we can work on getting the payload weights up. Give me $5 billion and I'll have the fleet plus one that's set up to go Earth orbit to Lunar Surface and return to Earth orbit as often as we like (each trip costing about 10 flights Earth to Earth orbit to refuel it). Costing: 700,000 pounds of fuel at $2 per pound times 4 as a guess. Throw in other stuff and the marginal costs are maybe $10 million a flight Earth to Earth orbit, so about $100 million to go back to the Moon.

Now, as a backup in case single stage is the wrong way to go -- and I can be convinced that it is -- hand another $1 billion to Burt Rutan and let him try his air lift first stage approach. Then have a flyoff. Hell, go mad: give me a billion, give Burt a billion, hand a billion to each of the remaining big aerospace companies, and give a billion to NASA. That's $5 billion, less than the annual cost of the Shuttle program -- have you noticed that the program cost is independent of the number of Shuttle launches? NASA will waste its billion, the two aerospace companies will futz around with studies that end up requesting $20 billion each and produce nothing but paper, but you may be sure that Rutan and I will both have some flying hardware.

Now, recently we talked a bit about L. Ron Hubbard and his deceptively simple discovery: if you can't dazzle 'em with your brilliance, baffle 'em with your bullshit.

The most aggravating thing about Pournelle's rant is that he refuses to acknowledge the completely fucking obvious -- that it's easy to talk big while he's sitting on his patio, drinking a glass of iced tea.

Given that Pournelle worships at the altar of the Free Market, why does he say he'll do it if the taxpayers "give him" a billion dollars? If his plan is so fool-proof -- if it will bring down the cost-per-pound on payload launches so dramatically -- why doesn't he round up some wealthy investors, pitch his plan, cash the checks, and start to work? After all, that was the scenario envisioned by Pournelle's mentor Robert Heinlein back in 1950, in the movie "Destination Moon".

The truth is, Pournelle is good at talking tough, but he's not much good at anything else. A few years ago, guys like Pournelle were bashing NASA because it was too "risk-averse"; it was supposedly so afraid of losing astronauts that it demanded an excessively high safety margin. Now NASA is being bashed because it's incapable of launching shuttles safely.

Either way, of course, Pournelle wins. Because he doesn't have to actually do what he claims he can do.