Political Commentary, Space

Has The Wall Finally Come Down Completely?

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Back in the 1990s, the Clinton administration made the disastrous policy decision to eliminate intra-government competition in launch systems, and assigned expendables to the military and reusables to NASA. As a result, fifteen years later, we had the X-33 fiasco, and since then, have no significant government activities in the latter area.

But the Air Force has put out a Request for Information (RFI) for data on reusable first stages (and interestingly, it includes suborbital as a mission category, in which case it could be a single-stage reusable). There’s no serious money flowing yet, or requests for actual proposals, but I hope that this means that the DoD will finally pick up the ball that NASA dropped, and get on with the business of supporting the vital development of space transports.

[Via Doug Messier]

One thought on “Has The Wall Finally Come Down Completely?”

  1. It would make a good launcher for things like the Marines SUSTAIN suborbital troup transport.

    😉

    And yes, it not only is a MAJOR step forward for RLVs, it could be a major step for CATS since the mil doesn’t have big space centers and programs it must maintain with inefficent launchers huge staffs.

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