The Space Frontier Foundation has come out against NASA's planned Orbital Space Plane.

While the idea of the OSP itself may or may not have merit; it is the way OSP is undertaken which is of paramount importance. Absolutely all experience of the last two decades suggests ? indeed insists ? that the OSP is doomed to failure under typical NASA acquisition strategy. The litany of NASA's cancelled vehicle programs stretches back to the Reagan Administration's NASP "Orient Express," and includes the X-33, X-34, X-38, 2GRLV and now SLI. How many times can Congress abide these failures?

Public suspicions that NASA is little more than a jobs program are fueled by seeing NASA so comfortable with failure and endless retries. It is left to Congress and the White House to require that the correct lessons from these failures are learned and applied.

They're right.

Very good. I hope it is followed up.

Billions for the space program, but not one penny...

Rand, I notice that you didn't quote the entire press release. Remember a week or so ago when you were peevishly asking me why I kept bringing up the X-33 fiasco? It seems the the Space Frontier people have the same fixed idea about the x-33 project as I do: that the X-33 project failure must be studied, not just swallowed down NASA's institutional memory black hole.

... Also not that the Space Frontier Foundation is not necessarily anti-OSP.

david.davenport@mindspring.com

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=10416

PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Tuesday, January 14, 2003
Space Frontier Foundation

New NASA Program Doomed to Failure, NASA Should Explain Failures, Space Frontier Foundation Tells Congress

... Although we have a number of ideas about how to improve the OSP program's chances of success, the key one we wish you to address immediately is simply to demand an accounting for the failures of past programs. Specifically, we urge Congress to demand an explanation of the failure of the X-33 and similar programs. Whereas failure investigations typically focus on explaining technical failures such as crashes, what is needed here is something quite different: a determination of the cause of program failure. Since none of these vehicles were ever completed and no flights were attempted, NASA was able to quietly sweep whole programs under the rug without such an accounting.

If NASA's rationalizations focus on the X-33 program, it is important that the failure report do so as well, to prevent NASA from shifting blame. Likewise, it is crucial that this effort be independently chartered by Congress, not NASA, in order to have credibility.

NASA continues creating and blithely canceling vehicle programs while wasting billions of dollars and producing no usable space vehicles. Meanwhile, our Space Shuttle fleet is aging, the cost of space transportation remains forbiddingly high, private sector investors and entrepreneurs are excluded from helping, and the USA continues to lose market share in the space launch business.

You have no doubt heard insanity defined as, "Repeating the same action and expecting different results." NASA's approach to OSP certainly qualifies as insane by that measure. We stand ready to assist in injecting sanity this time around, and hope you will also.

Respectfully,

John Cserep

Chairman, Message & Policy Committee
Space Frontier Foundation

If I was peeved, it's not because I don't think it should be investigated--it was because you brought it up on several posts that had nothing to do with the subject.

As a price for negotiations between the two governments, the French emissaries demanded a bribe of about $250,000 (to be paid to Talleyrand), a large official loan from the United States, and an apology for certain references to France in a recent speech by Adams. Although bribery was not an unknown adjunct to the diplomacy of that day -- particularly where Talleyrand was concerned -- the Americans found the proposition totally unacceptable. (Pinckney's supposed retort, "Millions for defense, sir, but not one cent for tribute," is the origin of the famed shibboleth, although the words were not his. Pinckney did, however, exclaim at one point in the conversations: "No! No! Not a sixpence!") -- Grolier's

Either way... I share the sentiment! :)

Where is the X33? NASA has stopped the program two years ago.Is it impossible to use the demonstrator as a test bed for high speed program?
(I heard it was achieved by 85%)