The Space Frontier Foundation has come out against NASA’s planned Orbital Space Plane.

While the idea of the OSP itself may or may not have merit; it is the way OSP is undertaken which is of paramount importance. Absolutely all experience of the last two decades suggests ? indeed insists ? that the OSP is doomed to failure under typical NASA acquisition strategy. The litany of NASA’s cancelled vehicle programs stretches back to the Reagan Administration’s NASP “Orient Express,” and includes the X-33, X-34, X-38, 2GRLV and now SLI. How many times can Congress abide these failures?

Public suspicions that NASA is little more than a jobs program are fueled by seeing NASA so comfortable with failure and endless retries. It is left to Congress and the White House to require that the correct lessons from these failures are learned and applied.

They’re right.