Continuing the visionary aerospace thread, there's almost a "mouse on the moon" quality to India's avatar.

No disrespect meant for India here. Quite the opposite. I think there's long been a tendency to underestimate the country and its extraordinary intellectual capital. Here's one of the projects I would definitely keep an eye on.

From Wikipedia:
:

The idea is to develop a spaceplane vehicle that can take off from conventional airfields. Its liquid air cycle engine would collect air in the atmosphere on the way up, liquefy it, separate oxygen and store it on board for subsequent flight beyond the atmosphere. The Avatar, a reusable launch vehicle, was first announced in May 1998 at the Aero India 98 exhibition held at Bangalore. 

Avatar seems to have, if you'll pardon the metaphor, stalled out (recent tests don't seem to involve any of the really cutting-edge stuff). It could be that the technology actually has hit a wall. That would hardly be surprising for something this ambitious. There's another possibility, however, that is both more encouraging and depressing at the same time, namely that it simply hasn't gotten the funding it needs. Depressing because that would mean we have unnecessarily delayed important advances. Encouraging because it suggests that we still might get this plane flying.

There's a lot of money floating around out there in the vanity aerospace industry and it would be nice to see it go to something ambitious and important. With all due respect to the recently departed, if Paul Allen had taken the money spent on 60 year old visions of space travel and poured it into something forward thinking, his greater legacy might've been what he did after Microsoft.