It is clear the first most important factor for such a project like this to succeed is the cash flow. Basically enough money to get even more money. Focus is paramount as well as an agile business framework.
The tools, the material, even the rocket engines exist today. This is not about some pie in the sky endeavor but a mature reflection on how much a synthesis of today's available technology and marketing can be used to create something beyond inspiring. Something that can galvanize and move.
The cars and the planes defines our civilization, our world. How much more can a VTOL vehicle with tens of tons of lift capability and a performance envelope reaching into Space Shuttle territory do? Especially if it creates a passionate response and seems like the eerie transition of a sci-fi series that lasted 14 episodes and a feature movie into REALITY.
Well in a way it is a symbiosis between the world of ideas, the imaginary, and the hard knocks school of reality and the physical world. It just so happens that out of the hundreds of designs and bad sci-fi I saw so far in my lifetime something struck me as profoundly beautiful and achievable, as when Mal saw Serenity in that "out of gas" episode where the history of that imaginary vessel is chronicled somehow. I was looking for a shape, something more interesting than a tube and a rocket engine cone in the end. And I found it...
To achieve the goal I want to realize here the most important thing, besides cash flow and how to generate it, is also understand how (advanced high tech) projects fail, even in light of endless funding.
Constellation failed, the American SST failed in its craddle and later the Concorde also was nixed... the Space Shuttle itself is on the block after a murderous record of 14 dead in less than 120 missions at a cost each exceeding that of any 1960s era conventional manned rocket mission. How many other space-related projects also failed or ended up half baked and neither practical nor cost effective?
The lesson I have from such a richly populated graveyard is that small lightweight and agile business endeavor can see things to which there is a huge psychological block from large established ones.
IBM took 1 year to produce an empty box in 1981 so slow and heavy handed was its organization. Then came Microsoft... Toyota was created in a garage, as was Apple, at a time when computers filled an entire room.
The law of diminishing returns is a very harsh mistress indeed : You can't have one man dig a hole in 60 seconds, and expect 60 men to dig a hole in 1 sec. Yet most large corporations think that way.
The same applies here... but things are even easier and simpler today than for all those startups of old.
Meetings? just use IM... and you can talk to several people at once. Everything is so much easier and efficient in writing, leaving maybe 1% of the interaction in a team to be done in person.
Off the shelf one will find all they need to build a spaceship. Large capacity cryogenic tanks, composite material tubes to make meshes and tiles able to withtand the huge plasma cloud of reentry while being as lightweight as a sponge. Even liquid oxygen/hydrogen engines are on the free market somehow.
Using a vessel form taken from a defunct cult series with enough of a following to make a feature movie out of it 3 years later is also a good marketing move. Nobody among the people who can finance such a project will seriously dream of this at night:
But Serenity yes. People were exposed to its image for hours at a time. The producer of the series simply made it another member of the crew.
Passion and just glean what we already have around us, was always there. Then optimize and optimize and keep the focus on the goal and the simplest way to get there. Always strive to thwart the laws of diminishing returns and KISS.
Like a sculpture, a working version of a Firefly can be made by brushing away the excess and the psychological barriers people have in creating something so incredible.
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