Here's a good article on some of what's going on in Wyoming on the space front, from the Laramie paper (which is unaccountably called the Boomerang). Articles like this, and the recent Popular Science piece on space diving, are more signs that the giggle factor is gone, and that the media is starting to take personal spaceflight seriously.

Rand,

Just a bit of backstory here. IIRC, the Laramie Daily Boomerang is named for a mule that 'always came back'.

It's been a while since I was a regular reader during my stint at UWYO (A&S '92) but, unless there have been some significant editorial shifts, an article about a local businessman in the "Rumorbang" doesn't necessarily constitute a ringing endorsement of a subject's sanity or social viability.

A bit of digging reveals the full truth:

Laramie Boomerang (March 11, 1881)

First editor was famous humorist Bill Nye who named the newspaper for his mule, Boomerang. The mule gained the name because, as Nye said, the mule would run away, but always come back just like a boomerang.

http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/RobertsHistory/Hyperlinks/Wyoming_Almanac.htm

That said, anybody who can build a competitive lunar lander candidate in a missile silo in southeast Wyoming has my admiration and support!

I doubt I'm the only person why looked at the MOOSE proposal and said, "Man, that looks like fun!"

Space diving sounds like a real rush but way, way out of my price range.

Space diving has the nice property of being fairly insensitive to launcher failures (as long as the customer isn't toasted on the pad, but hopefully the suit would protect to some extent even against that).

'Orbital Skydiving' as a sport was forseen in Star Trek. A scene of James Kirk doing so, went unused in 'Stat Trek; Generations' and B'Elanna Torres also did so, via the holodeck of USS Voyager...

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Orbital_skydiving

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Generations#Trivia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REhmdOE5pT0

I think that using any kind of liquid fuel is just too costly to make space travel worthwhile. I would be in favor of something that involves a rail gun. Perhaps you would still need boosters with fuel in them to assist, but at least you could save a little bit on the expenditure of so much rocket fuel to get into space.

I think that using any kind of liquid fuel is just too costly to make space travel worthwhile.

Why do you say this? Liquid rocket propellant can be very inexpensive, and is usually a negligible part of the cost of a launch.

Why do you say this?

The usual reason. Ignorance as to the reason for high launch costs. It's an example of the old saying that the problem isn't what folks don't know, but the things they know for damned sure that are wrong.