Spaceship One, Instapundit and TCS.

Several vaguely interesting things have followed on from the Techcentralstation I piece I did on Spaceship One and the free market thingummybob.
The first was that someone else building rockets contacted me and wanted to know the name of that "Taiwanese bicycle manufacturer" I mentioned who could provide aluminium rather better than that used by NASA. As it turns out this company works at Vandenburg Air Force base near where I used to live in California. Also the place where grandfather used to work all those years ago. So an interesting little coincidence perhaps. What was more was that they had been looking around for aluminium scandium to play with for ages, and could not find anyone to actually sell them plate or sheet. As the world's expert in this material (really, yes, I am....someone has to be and in this version of the universe it's me. That would be today's gratuitous scandium reference then.) I was glad to be able to direct them to one of my customers. Plus to the world's best listing of technical papers on the subject (Jostein, I think they'll be calling you on Monday as well) and to the world's best source on how to weld the material.
Anyway, so that was all nice, being able to get one other rocketeer a little closer to his dream.
Then I got Instapundited. Hey, great, only been out here blogging 2.5 months and the maestro himself a) likes my little piece and b) after some prompting links to the blog. But, ermm, what happened? I can see about 500 hits over the past two days via www.instapundit.com. Is this the longed for Installanche? That's it? Out of the quarter million hits he's had over the past two days precisely 0.2 % came to my little blog? Less than came over from Protein Wisdom or Virginia Postrel when they linked?
Hhhhm. Going to have to hope that some of the other little sneaky things I'm trying will drive up traffic then. I guess I could lay claim to the smallest Installanche ever, so that's one record to treasure.
The final thing was someone complaining about my reference in the piece to "curious monkey brains". Apparently there are people out there interested in space and rockets but not quite up on this evolution thing yet. Sheesh.