From SpaceRef:

NASA and aerospace industry representatives will announce results of the Space Launch Initiative’s first milestone review, which narrowed the field of potential technologies and architecture designs for our nation’s next reusable launch vehicle. NASA’s Space Launch Initiative is designing the next-generation space transportation system by first developing the technologies needed to ensure a safer, more reliable system that can be operated at a much lower cost.

If I could spare any, I’d be pulling my hair. I hope that this is just inertia, and it’s something that O’Keefe will fix when he’s got the ISS budget situation under control.

There should not be a “nation’s next reusable launch vehicle.” That was (in Hayek’s words) the fatal conceit of both the Shuttle and of the ill-fated X-33 program. NASA has to get out of the vehicle development business, and simply put incentives into place for private industry to develop new vehicles. If NASA is in charge, it will be doomed to failure, and if there is a single vehicle, it will be another Shuttle-like disaster from a cost standpoint, because it will once again be one-size-fits all, excelling at nothing.

We don’t need a new launch vehicle. We need a new launch industry. And the Space Launch Initiative, in anything resembling its current incarnation, should be strangled in the cradle.