I am a rocket scientist who was motivated to do the work to understand
rockets with the idea that in my future, there would be a helicopter
in every garage, daily commercial flights to the moon, settlements on
Mars, industrial development of the solar system in support of freedom
and liberty for all...

A litle of it is described here
http://www.trashotron.com/agony/columns/05-24-02.htm

And I found a few sympathetic voices
http://www.bigear.org/JDKpassage-articles.htm#Dispatch20040723

The reality that transpired didn't involve space ships plying the
spaceways, and helicopters filling our skies -relies on reducing the
cost of imparting momentum to payloads. This is the critical factor.
Investment in cost reducing technology, stopped in the 1960s - and
progress ended there.

As a consequence, the reality our world is that over 12 million rocket
engines have been built and used, as rocket-propelled grenades.
Rocket science has been applied in the production of shaped charges
for these grenades to penetrate sheilding, and in the construction of
thermobaric weapons like the RPG-29 that efficiently decimate anything
within a well defined area of action for such weapons.

This has created a world that falls far short of the idyllic vision of
my youth.

My first job offer was with McDonnell Douglas to improve camera guided
bombs used in Vietnam. Much was made of the Nitske Criterion during
Reagan's SDI program - where the weapon cost more than the target.
We had already waged such a war in Vietnam, sending $200,000 bombs to
destroy mud hamlets.

This is not what I grew up to do with my creativity. My world was
more like that described in the video below ... I didn't want to be
the guy who made the bombs, airplanes and rockets more efficient - and
support a nation that had turned from liberator to oppressor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7vCww3j2-w

When I hear the following song, particularly the first two verses, I
am reminded that during the Clinton Administration following a
thorough inventory of of Russian nuclear arsenal, there were a handful
(exact number classified) of nuclear weapons missing from the Russian
inventory. Nearly all the man-portable weapons were gone. These
loose nukes are out there, we know they were built, we know they are
gone, we don't know who has them. Terrorists, or pre-placed to thward
a successful SDI development.

We won't know until they are used. All these weapons are larger than
the bomb that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Every State
Capital is a target, even Ohio's Capital.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb9dFs0KaXA

Our goal as a nation should be to build a world of freedom and
liberty, opportunity and plenty where war is a thing of the past where
technology is appropriately applied to our problems to create win-win
solutions throughout.

To do otherwise, we are merely managing the decline of our species
into a post-technical era where our present hopes dreams and
aspirations will be impossible for our children and their children to
imagine.

Creating low-cost oil from sunlight and coal is but the first step.
There are others, even more difficult, but we must take them, we will
take them, with the right leadership.

Reducing the cost of momentum makes the following development arc
possible - based on the velocity relationship between Earth's surface
and the rest of the universe;

1) small suborbital payloads
consequence: ICBMs
paradigm: world peace/global thermonuclear war

2) moderate orbiting payloads
consequence: Telstar to Sirius Satellite
paradigm: global services - communications, navigation,
weather, sensing
(telerobotics at low cost change the way industry is
done)
3) large cislunar payloads
consequence: Apollo
paradigm: environmental movement/earth from space

The result of each development is a shift in global conciousness and
the arising of a global political paradigm since anything beyond Earth
affects everyone on Earth equally.

What's the next step?

The development of nuclear pulse rocketry permits;

4) very large interplanetary payloads
consequence: Industrial development of space resources
a) power satellites
b) asteroid capture and development
(using telerobotics)
c) settlement of the moon and mars
d) settlement of asteroids
e) manned outposts throughout solar system
f) interstellar probes
paradigm: Earth as center of an interplanetary frontier

Beyond nuclear pulse there is laser propelled rockets - which
traverses the same development arc as energy and power levels increase
- but at far lower costs and in far larger numbers

5) sub-orbital payloads at very low cost
consequence: instant package delivery
paradigm: global community subsumes nation states

6) moderate orbiting payloads at very low cost
consequence: expansion of industrial system to low orbit
paradigm: Earth dominates interplanetary industry

7) large cislunar payloads at very low cost
consequence: Space homes
paradigm: Diaspora - movement of humanity off-world

8) very large interplanetary payloads at very low cost
consequene: Mobile space colonies
paradigm: Golden age of Interplanetary development

9) very large payloads at 1/3 light speed at very low cost
consequence: Mobile slow boat starships
paradigm: Golden age of sublight interstellar expansion

Here, clouds of automated solar pumped lasers in tight orbit around
the sun coordinate their activity to synthesize large apeture
emissions - beam width's 6 million km in diameter - to project
powerful beams to light sail driven space colonies traversing to
nearby stars.

Next, worlds within 20 light years - will be settled within 60 years
of step 9 -

http://www.solstation.com/stars/s20ly.htm

131 stars, with 1,500 worlds/worldlets, all terraformed, or converted
to monumentally sized space colonies powered by the central star in
each system..

These stars exchange valuable objects at 1/3 light speed - and a
handful arrange to organize the collision of shaped iron-56 objects at
1/3 light speed -in an effort to create engineered black hole dusts.
The gravitational, electronic, and magnetic interaction of these
collection of dusts can be made to implement a wide range of products,
including computing platforms, and if certain engineering results are
forthcoming, brand-new ways to transcend time, space, and light speed,
even tapping into the zero-point energy of the cosmos to power new
forms of transport, and even self-replicate dusts made the hard way by
colliding iron-56 at high speed.

Success here provides the potential of the next step - which is more
speculative than the preceeding steps;

10) faster than light travel
a) time telephone
b) time travel
c) cosmic exploration
d) cosmic engineering

Starting with small masses and proceeding to larger ones. Self
replicating machines that tap the zero point energy of the cosmos to
extract from the Higgs field whatever is desired, would be unlimited
in their potential.

To Fermi's question; Where are they? The answer is obvious when we
look at it this way;

Starting at subsistence level, as industrial development proceeds,
standard of living rises with rising income for a given amount of
work. As standards rise, improvements are made in medical science,
which increases longevity, and survival of children. This leads to a
population explosion which peaks around $5,000 per person per year.
Beyond this point, reproductive rates fall. Why? Likely explanation
is that women become more educated, and both men and women are more
distracted in non-procreative activities. At around $15,000 per
person per year income, we fall below replacement level. The world
is at around $8,000 per person per year now, but nations like the USA,
Canada, most European nations, most Middle Eastern nations, and the
Asian Tigers, and Australia, are below replacement level and grow by
immigration.

This suggests that as the standard of living continues to rise
population growth rates will fall below replacement levels worldwide.

Not to worry, longevity research will extend life dramatically, and
the development of practical AI and its application to robotics, will
provide a means for the low wage nations to shift their labor burden
to robots as they ascend the industrial development curve.

Our propensity to warfare is a temporary fixation. It has been fully
explained by those who study it - ie. see Alice Miller and Drama of
the Gifted Child - and the development of 'tame' humans appears to be
a natural consequence of abundance. ie. see the development of the
Silver Fox by Russian researchers - and contrast that with the Cold
War Generation Gap of the baby boomers and their parents. A life
lived without serious frustration of desire leads to a different sort
of human than those who face nearly continuous frustration.

The result for humans is that

a) agressive impulses are reduced, and
b) numbers peak and then fall.

Comparing changes in reproductive rates and economic growth rates,
indicates that human numbers will peak at 8.5 billion - by mid
century, and decline slowly - as aging research extends lifespans.
Robot numbers will grow starting just after the peak, and rise to
exceed human numbers by the 22nd century.

Dropping at just 1/10th percent per year - with a human sphere of
influence expanding at 1/3 light speed - human numbers per star system
drop dramatically with distance - reaching barely 100 light years in
300 years where 2.5 billion people spread among 14,600 stars - 172,000
people per star.

Well before we reach the edge of the Perseus arm, human numbers fall
below 1 person per star.

Increasing rates of travel to light speed and beyond, reduces human
DENSITY.

If we start with more humans at the outset, we'll extend further into
the cosmos.

Just as there was a human genome project in the 1990s, by the 2090s
there may be a human recovery project. The ability to build a
ringworld, or dyson sphere, or elements of the same, around Sol and
other stars, using robot labor, combined with even a limited time
viewer and advanced forensic techniques, would allow humanity to
support a human recovery project - to retrieve all human beings who
have ever lived, and allow them to live out their lives in a modern
age in an earthlike environment serviced by super-human robots with
valued cohorts. A sort of heaven on Earth.

This may be the central activity of the 22nd century - and will
support the eventual expansion of humans further into the cosmos.

But even recovery of all human and humanoid creatures going as far
back as 2 million years, will not include more than 20 billion
people. This is 1/10th the number of stars in our own galaxy, and
less than 1/10th the number of galaxies even. So, superluminal
travel for ALL humans who ever existed, would still reduce human
density to less than 1 human per star - which despite huge capacities
for each individual human, would be difficult for a primitive non-
space faring species to detect.