Art Stephenson, head of Marshall Space Flight Center, is retiring.

I certainly won’t miss him. He was a prominent one of the many “authoritative” voices at NASA who make false claims about the technology state, that make it harder to raise money for commercial launch vehicles.

Art Stephenson, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said that both the X-33 and X-34 may have failed because they were too ambitious. The X-33 in particular was originally meant to be a subscale model of VentureStar, a single- stage to orbit reusable launch vehicle proposed by Lockheed Martin. Although the designs of the X-33 and VentureStar diverged to a degree over time, the company planned to use some of the technologies tested by the X-33 into VentureStar.

“We have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from these X-programs, but one of the things we have learned is that our technology has not yet advanced to the point that we can successfully develop a new reusable launch vehicle that substantially improves safety, reliability and affordability,” he said.

This is utter Bravo Sierra.

The failure of the two programs is indicative of nothing other than NASA capability to mismanage, and no grand or general conclusions about technology readiness for reusable space vehicles could be reasonably drawn from them. If that’s what he learned from those program failures, he needs to go back to school, and learn a little epistemology. Now that he’s retired, maybe he’ll have time, and will stop doing so much damage to our future in space.