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It is interesting to read all of the replies to this article. I am sad that so many of you are so misinformed about both the space technology and those who have been working to improve it. I am sadder still to see so much attribution of wrong-headed motivation to NASA employees.

I have been working on the SLI project at Marshall Space Flight Center for the past 2 years, have been participating in developing the requirements, analyzing proposed architectures submitted by both NASA and the contractors, listening to the lessons learned from the Shuttle, and listening to what upper NASA management has been saying. I do this full time, and I tell you that you are misinformed.

This technology is HARD, wickedly hard. Jet engine technology must cope with room temperature fuel and ambient temperature oxygen. Rockets deal with liquid oxygen (very cold) and liquid hydrogen (very very cold) and operate in space (very very very cold) with no gravity to keep the gas and liquid separated. Electrical equipment must operate in space in an environment of intense ionizing radiation. The vehicle must then re-enter the atmosphere at orbital speeds and use the air to brake its speed, thereby producing very very high temperatures. And in all this environment, the equipment must be extremely reliable so that people will not die due to its failure to operate. And that requires lots and lots of time to do lots and lots of analyses from lots and lots of points of view to design and build such vehicles.

I will not claim the NASA people are perfect; in fact I am often frustrated at the length of time it takes them to make decisions; but almost every one of them that I work with are trying to solve the problem, not just retire in place. They all realize that the Shuttle is still using Z-80 processors for some of its computation -- it badly needs replacing.

Secondly, the politicians have decided that we can only afford about $15 billion per year to do all of NASA missions. SLI spent about three years developing designs and cost estimates that showed it could not be done within expected NASA budgets. So NASA changed the problem to a cheaper OSP in the near term (i.e., 8 to 10 years) and continued research on 3rd generation single-stage-to-orbit vehicles thereafter (this won't be in the near term because the technology is just not there yet).

This reminds me of the Shuttle decision - there wasn't enough money to develop the re-usable boosters, so they settled for the refurbishable (i.e., rebuildable) boosters we have now.

Contrary to those who say NASA is "stuck in the 60s", NASA and its contractors did in fact analyze architectures which used a reusable horizontal launch behicle as the first stage. The "neatest" design I saw was one in which the the aircraft took off with an orbiter on top filled with liquid hydrogen, flew to 30 thousand feet, then extracted air from the jet engine compressors, chilled it to a liquid with liquid hydrogen, threw away the nitrogen and kept the liquid oxygen and filled the orbiter tanks with it; after 3 hours, when the tanks were full (about 1/2 million pounds of it), the orbiter disengaged and fired its rockets of liquid hydrogen and oxygen to go to orbit. The airplane flew back home to an airport. The orbiter landed at an airport. Neat! But ... the technology is not quite there yet.

None of this history is a secret. Much of it is available on "NASAwatch.com".

This technology is HARD, wickedly hard. Jet engine technology must cope with room temperature fuel and ambient temperature oxygen. Rockets deal with liquid oxygen (very cold) and liquid hydrogen (very very cold) and operate in space (very very very cold) with no gravity to keep the gas and liquid separated. Electrical equipment must operate in space in an environment of intense ionizing radiation. The vehicle must then re-enter the atmosphere at orbital speeds and use the air to brake its speed, thereby producing very very high temperatures. And in all this environment, the equipment must be extremely reliable so that people will not die due to its failure to operate. And that requires lots and lots of time to do lots and lots of analyses from lots and lots of points of view to design and build such vehicles.

Ok, it sounds too hard for you. Perhaps you should find an easier job?

I am not kidding. If all we can get for $15 billion a year is what we are getting, then screw it. Shut the whole thing down, and try again in thirty years when the technology is there to do it economically.

If I whined to my boss like you are about how hard my job is, I would have the opportunity to find easier work in about 30 seconds.

This technology is HARD, wickedly hard.

It is amazing that some of it depends on the skill level of a very few persons. Welding, for example. However, overall, we are not impressed with how wickedly HARD this technology might be. In 1970 about 300,000 engineers and other support staff were laid off from various aerospace projects like this. All of them were capable of handling some aspect of this HARD technology and that includes technicians whose special skills translate engineering into hardware. By the way, many of those 300,000 have lost trust in government projects as a career and wouldn't come back on any but a consulting basis even if chairs were in desperate need of warming.