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.

Believe it or not, I agree with you on this one. NASA's space science projects work on this model--a scientists who specializes in a given field proposes a satellite or other platform to advance his field. That proposal competes with others for NASA's dollars, which it awards after studying the feasability and scientific merit of all the proposals in a given year. Why can't the next generation of orbital (and beyond) vehicles be chosen this way? I can't see why not.

Because it wouldn't maintain the jobs base in Alabama, Texas, and Florida...

Perhaps...but somebody's still gotta build the things, and most of the workers in Alabama, Texas and Florida are already subcontractors employed by Lockheed, etc.

The expertise to build low-cost launch vehicles does not reside at the traditional government contractors.

Do you people really mean to tell me that you don't want the goverment and a couple of large aerospace corporations to continue to monopolize human space flight for the next 30 years...? Remember, tens of thousands of votes...er, I mean people depend on the current system. On a serious note, however, I completely agreee with the sentiments expressed here thus far. The "next generation reusable launch vehicle" so often touted by NASA will just be another albatross hanging around their neck, and will only serve to maintain the status quo.