"Still, it would be wrong to accuse of sexism the "hundreds" of the investors who declined her project. She's an astrobiologist who wants to run a mass-manufacturing business. I'm not a venture capitalist, but I can see aversion to hardware manufacturing risk generally being the biggest factor here."

As physics as generally understood means this is 99% likely to be nonsense, another reasonable application of Ockham's Razor would be that the VCs passed because it's snake-oil.