May I point out that you are admitting global warming will have noticeable effects.

There is the thing and there is the management of the thing.

When the thing itself is the management of the thing then an unstoppable cycle is created. It will eventually consume the human race.

The real problem here is Islam.

And Christians are all sweetness and light

May I interrupt the "engineers are this or that" war to ask one thing? Could we get a definition of the word "engineer" for the purposes of hostilities?

Most places I know (with the exception of the province of Quebec) allow all characters no matter how unbalanced to call themselves engineers. So I guess we need to control for the population of sociopaths who call themselves engineers because calling themselves doctors would be illegal. And for the companies who call some guy named Charlie wielding a toilet plunger an engineer because... oh jeez that's depressing.

Also, I'd love to see citations when someone makes a "these people are like that"-type statement.

Thank you.

It is consistent with recent history that U.S. leadership believes they are entitled to mandate people's behaviour. If they really wanted to make people's lives better they would re-think their belief that fear and greed are the only two dimensions of human motivation. Fear being the problem at hand.

Fear of unemployment, fear of China, fear of Islam, fear of the black man, fear of Mexicans, fear of government, fear of the competition, fear of young people, fear of old people, fear of liberals, fear of bombs, fear of crowds, fear of complacency, fear of men wearing fezzes, fear of sexuality, fear of strange.

People eat comfort food because it makes them feel better. Americans feel bad. Maybe American leadership could make it a priority to help their citizens to have happy lives and stop it with the forcing people to do that they say.

You might double the payload fraction of the rocket part of the system, but that is not the only part of the flight vehicle. The ride up to 40 000 ft isn't free. So you haven't halved the launch costs per lb of payload as your simple analysis might imply. The costs of designing, building, maintaining, and operating the winged component aren't known but are unlikely to be negligible.

Your point about the g-losses is strange. Rockets follow a ballistic trajectory which goes straight-ish up at the beginning at enough of an angle so that the path will "tip over" to level at exactly the right altitude.

True about drag, as far as it goes. Cylinders are particularly strong and aerodynamic in the axial direction, and the velocity is relatively slow where the atmosphere is dense so you don't get much. Any gain is probably more than cancelled out because you have to design the rocket heavier to do a pitch-up maneuver which is why the thing has a wing like Pegasus. By the way, the wing in the picture is oddly located. In the real thing if it's ever built the wing should be farther forward.

The nozzle part is right on.

The way I look at it is this: winged flyback stages will be really worth it if they allow you to eliminate a whole stage from the ballistic part. Just making the ballistic part a bit smaller doesn't help because you still need to buy all the same parts, maybe just small ones. The savings can be incremental but not revolutionary.

Mach 6 at 60,000 feet gives you 6% of the energy you need to to orbit. A carrier airplane isn't worth the effort.

Nobody wants to tell him that because...why turn off the money? Another thing poor old Paul isn`t being told:

Q: How do you make a small fortune in aerospace?

A: Start with a large fortune.

These guys are all playing...like the hot-air balloonists who were playing around while Orville and Wilbur were doing the real deal. What the brothers did was hard. Think of it in modern terms: what if there were two guys, one who could cobble together the hardware software and physics to simulate hypersonic flow, and the other guy who could beg borrow steal or pyrolize enough carbon/carbon and titanium to make a scram SSTO. It's almost unimaginable, just like what Orville and Wilbur did. We don't yet know if those two guys will ever exist.

Yeah, when I was a kid my dad was a VP at GE. That is until another VP sabotaged my dad's career and got him busted to cleaning bathrooms as it were. GE encourages that kind of "competitive energy". So we paid for GE on the way up because dad was never around then on the way down because we were broke. I won't get in to what it did to the family.

Those people would make half their employees eat the other half's babies if there was money in it. Health care? The only thing GE knows about medicine is the most efficient way to suck peoples' blood out of their veins.