Nice article, nothing wrong with ambitions to do more in aerospace, and you are right, there is so much more we could do. I say this as a product of the aerospace industry myself.
The thing missing is money, which is just energy.
Aerospace is the most sensitive industry to availability of energy. Lower availability of energy knocks on profitability of all business not just aerospace, but its the one most sensitive, and the energy is all extracted from Earth as stands. Profit is energy extracted from the planet, never from solar. There is a curve modeling this, it can be modeled by a torque converter function, ChatGPT can knock up the partial differential equations and even plots the curve. It's elliptical and peaked in the 70s-80s when we still had manned flights to the moon, supersonic commercial passenger flight, and reusable space shuttles. Its also related to the value in money, it charts the energy value in money, whilst energy quantifies what can be done with money at any time. This is why now I've been banging on about changing to a solar indexed economy before more damage is done. We are losing aerospace, when its completely unnecessary, in fact there would be the funds to give to you for whatever projects you might have in mind to knock up new aircraft concepts, not just yours but many more. We could have Concorde back in the air flying around the world, rather than just the limited distance it used to do. And all of this industry would be cooling the planet rather than heating it, cleaning the air that we previously polluted, cleanding and recirculating water we previously polluted. All of it changes, from destruction, to creation, the instant we monetise the only actually mathematically positive energy source.
Everything we do on mathematically negative energy (Energy extracted from the planet), eventually tries to kill us, at least by harmful exhaust, whereas when it is powered by positive, we move to the same level as plants, all our output becomes benificial to life, repairing previous harm done.
Anyhow, sorry big response, I like your story, thanks for inspiring me to reply.
I think Guinness book of record might be a little behind the curve though. Here is the state of the art in long duration flight (Its still nowhere near as graceful or functional as any bird!)
