I'm saving your post. Yeah, it made perfect sense. Thanks for enlightening us.
On getting off the planet, somebody on BZPower talked about a school project where they were supposed to come up with alternate means of getting off the Earth. His was using some kind of magnetic field opposite of the Earth's to lift a spacecraft off. They did a small experiment based on it and it seemed to work.
I forgot precisely how he said it worked but it sounded pretty neat.