Already Internet discussion on post-Aquarius Rising stages, particularly the Bifrost launch system has highlighted "the technical problems with Bifrost the way I wrote it," Savage concedes. "One of our best technical scientists, Stanford Linear Accelerator’s Eric Lee, has done a really magnificent job of repairing the whole structure and fixing various technical problems."

"There are many good new ideas in terms of space colonization in the post-Bifrost part in the Millennial Project book," Levit claims, "however a lot more new ideas are going to be necessary before it happens. The whole thing is not going to come off like it was described in the very first book on the subject! Importantly for the first time, people who are really interested in looking can see a set of dots that can be connected to get to the stars."

"We will never become a space-faring civilization if our payload launch costs continue to be US$12/gm," Savage firmly states. Whilst NASA established the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics research program in 1987 to examine this problem, it has been crippled by low funding and problems with the Delta rocket launch system. "Solutions are to be found by the Fuller means of wandering across disciplines and taking disparate pieces that don't seem to relate to each other, and bringing them together into a new synthesis. For that, almost by definition, you need some kind of generalist – that's what I am."

NASA itself comes under considerable fire from Savage. "The place NASA went wrong was at the very beginning. They technologically were on the fast track around 30 years ago; within less than a decade of building prototype rocket planes that could launch with a man at the controls and fly into orbit, and then re-enter Earth's atmosphere and land, essentially just pushing the aerospace envelope up to orbit. Within a decade of that I could almost guarantee you that the large-scale opening of the Space Frontier."

Cold War sociopolitical pressures caused "a technological war with the USSR where we plunked men on top of intercontinental ballistic missiles, which is completely the wrong technology for this application, and blasted them off into space."

Furthermore, President John F. Kennedy's initiative "was an historical stunt that really had everything to do with the Cold War, and nothing to do with the eventual civilisation of space."

"The space project has been at a standstill ever since Apollo," Savage says.

Problems with the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station continue to highlight NASA's "political/economical cul-de-sac; there is really no way out for that model. It's going to take something completely different other than a national space program to get the human-civilization-in-space movement going. It will take something like the Living Universe Foundation to do that; a human organization analogous to a focused electron laser, full of people who are motivated to make it happen."

Levit believes that "for all the mistakes and stupid things that NASA has done, they're the only game in town right now except for maybe the Russians. There are not too many people who are actually going up and living in space, except if it is involving NASA in some way. A lot of people are working for NASA because they want to participate in this kind of activity, and they're just dying to hear of some way to actually pull it off.

"I'm trying to generate some interest from within NASA in what the Living Universe Foundation advocates; there should be a fair amount of interest by the younger and more open minded individuals within NASA or associated aerospace industries and agencies, if only on a personal, individual basis."

Ultimately Savage, Levit, Reynolds and associated colleagues are promoting a more Promethean view of humanity in an attempt to overcome the conceptual gridlock and environmental bottleneck they perceive as facing civilization. "That's the appropriate view of ourselves," Savage affirms. "There is far too much of the view of humanity as planetary cancer or Earth as flyspeck on the face of the grandeur of the universe. If you were a psychiatrist and you had a patient who came to you with a self-image that people project about the human race, well you should be getting a prescription for them!