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.

One time I went on an out-of-town training class for a particular FEM pre/post processing program that's popular in our industry. Funny story actually, I show up at their regional office and a couple of the sales reps who I knew looked at me blankly and said "Oh. That session was cancelled. Nobody signed up." That was pretty funny. So anyway, seeing as how I was working for a big customer of theirs at the time they decided to let me self-learn with their class materials and a machine. So I did that and after 1 day I find out about their macro programming tool and after 3 days I've written some pcl modules hooked in to GUI thingies. I know, not heroic but remember I'm not a software guy I'm a gearhead.

So the one fellow in charge of the office invited me along to dinner on the last night of my self-course and at the beginning of the meal suggested that I should apply for a job opening they have coming up for some kind of application engineer. Great I thought, flattering. I might have to take them up on that. Then I proceeded to tear into the lobster we were having with bare-handed gusto. I mean, fragments of lobster were flying all over. I may have had bits of it in my hair.

Still waiting to hear back on that job thing...it's only been 18 years...and they got bought...ahhh what the heck, between you and me it's a crappy program anyway.

Any relatively intelligent warmists want to break down for us specific flaws in the paper?

Any relatively literate reactionaries want to do their own research?

If the Earth was a peach, being in LEO wouldn't even get you out of the fuzz.