What he said.

"Giving NASA managers and government contractors who have failed over and over again billions of dollars to design and build a spaceplane specifically and only for NASA's use is the old way of doing things," Tumlinson said.

"We don't need one Orbital Spaceplane, we need many spaceplanes. We shouldn't be laying off astronauts, we should be opening the space frontier for more Americans. If this is done right, NASA can get all the transportation it needs, save billions in taxpayer funds, kick start a huge new industry and along the way, the people will at last get a chance to go into space themselves."

Yup! If only.

I have tried to avoid getting into the anti-NASA camp.

If Rutan succeeds in his attempt, that'll be the end of it for me, though.

You have to work with what you?ve got, when (not if) private RLVs are available I?d very much support NASA contracting for launch services. Right now it sounds like NASA is making the same mistake with the OSP that it made with the Shuttle, trying to combine too many missions into one vehicle. The CRV & CTV have two very different missions. The CRV needs to stay at the ISS for a prolonged period of time (weeks/months not days) in a standby mode. The X-38 used landing skids instead of tires and electric actuators instead of hydraulics. The folding wings suggested in the comments to an earlier post to allow an OSP to sit on top of an EELV was very interesting but, seems unnecessarily complicated for a CRV.
Seems to me that, they should split the two vehicles, reactivate the X-38, it was canceled less than a year ago, so maybe they could have a CRV ready by 2007 or 2008 only a year or two after the Russian?s commitment expires, and develop a separate CTV with folding wings. Telling the contractors that, if a private launch company builds an RLV before they?re finished building the OSP then they don?t get paid, and then we?ll see if it will still take until 2012 to have it ready.