Re: ALF: why not DRSSTC?

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Mddeming@xxxxxxx 

In a message dated 9/21/05 2:14:14 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, 
tesla@xxxxxxxxxx writes:

Sometimes investors want "high risk, high reward", and leave the
steady conservative advances to others.  Compare, for instance,
Rutan's approach to human space flight and NASA's.

Such investors are few and far between in today's litigious culture. 
In 1961 there were approximately 20,000 people in the US directly 
engaged at different levels in non-government supported rocket 
research. Today you can count them all without taking off your 
shoes.What makes "visionaries" newsworthy is that few financial types 
have the cojones to go for broke with large-scale temperamental 
technology. To most monetary backers, the forseeable difference in 
financial return between DRSSTC and OLTC at today's state-of-the-art 
is not commensurate with the risk of it bombing on first light, or 
having shaky operation.

Matt D.