New Hard Sci-Fi story

1) If we were directly in the line of sight of a tera
watt, digitized laser,many light years away, would it
perhaps be mistaken for a "natural" phenomenon? I don't think it would because the light would be monochromatic. I'm pretty sure there are no natural phenomena which produce monochromatic light, so it would be a definite indicator of technology. Of course it's being directly in the line of sight that's the long odds. 2) While I greatly admire the accomplishment of
SpaceShipOne, I wonder how long it will take to up the
velocity 4 times and the consequent energy input by 16
times? Won't that require a burn time about 20 times
longer (additional fuel to accelerate to 17,500 mph
plus the weight of the fuel itself)? It's been said more than once that if Rutan had to develop an orbital vehicle, he'd have to start from scratch with a new design. But the best hope of CATS enthusiasts right now is that these little suborbital vehicles will be able to do something that government-built orbital spacecraft have never been able to do: fly often, perhaps several times a week. It's been suggested that space travel has not progressed at the same rapid rate as aviation because flights are too infrequent. With frequent space flights, this newindustry may accumulate a large body of operational experience in the same way that we were able to do with passenger air travel. The technology then might start pushing the envelope incrementally. This would take the form of higher and higher ballistic hops to provide tourists with longer and longer periods of 0-G. Each improvement would involve greater amounts of kinetic energy, and greater re-entry heating. One might then eventually get to an orbital vehicle in a series of tiny baby steps. That may sound slow, but certainly the way the government has been doing it for decades isn't getting us anywhere very quickly.