Forty-nine years after its founding, Chair Force Engineer asks if NASA should get out of the manned spaceflight business. I think that’s inevitable, at least for earth to orbit segment (probably beyond as well, once access gets cheap enough for the Planetary or Mars Societies to sponsor their own expeditions, as the National Geographic Society does on earth), but there’s too much political inertia for it to happen before it becomes clear to everyone how absurd its proposed architecture is. That won’t happen, as he notes, until the private sector is launching people into space.