In an article at PopMech about Orion, Scott Horowitz sets up a classic strawman:
By relying on existing technology, the design would allow for more efficient construction, narrowing the gap between the shuttle’s retirement in 2010 and the next manned flight. But it also stirred a hot debate within the aerospace community. “NASA’s attitude seems to be that Apollo worked, so let’s just redo Apollo,” says Charles Lurio, a Boston space consultant. Burt Rutan, the mastermind behind the rocket SpaceShipOne, likened the new CEV to an archeological dig. “To get to Mars and the moons of Saturn, we need breakthroughs. But the way NASA’s doing it, we won’t be learning anything new.”
Scott Horowitz, NASA’s associate administrator for Exploration Systems, defends the agency’s approach. “Sure, we’d love to have antimatter warp drive,” he says. “But I suspect that would be kind of expensive. Unfortunately, we just don’t have the money for huge technological breakthroughs. We’ve got to do the best we can within our constraints of performance, cost and schedule.”
Emphasis mine. Note that neither Lurio or Rutan were calling for “antimatter warp drive.” Neither were they calling for unaffordable “huge technical breakthroughs,” as far as I’ve ever heard. They were simply asking for something that would be worth the many billions being invested in it. Instead, NASA sets up the false choice that it’s either Apollo or Star Trek, and continues, in its attitude, to keep us mired in a world of high cost and low productivity in space.