"According to a March 2001 statement from Art Stephenson, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, “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.”

"But this conclusion is absurd. In reality, all that the X-33 and X-34 failures proved was that we did not have the technologies in place to build an X-33 and an X-34. But few, if any, of these technologies are essential to building a generic reusable launch system. Since there hasn’t been any evidence to the contrary, the common-sense view from the 1960s—reusability will save money—is still a very reasonable proposition"

Okay.

If this guy has a design for cheap re-usable launch vehicle, he should be sharing that with us instead of his nonsense. As it is his writing amounts to no more than special pleading to give some money to his friends, to no useful end, and his refutation of the physics of launch systems amounts to no more than hand waving.

There have been multiple engineering studies done on re-usable systems, both 1 and 2 stage to orbit. What all of them have concluded is that we don't have the technologies to build one.

About the only type of launch vehicle that might lower the costs further is a big dumb booster - pressure fed liquid fuel. Now von Braun wanted those for the shuttle, and NIxon gave him solids.

I wouldn't mind if NASA spent some money supporting the firms working on those today.

But fundamentally, this gentleman still does not understand that Mars is simply not an Earth-like planet that can be easily settled - and that's reflected in his statement about Apollo being a race to beat the Soviets to the Moon. The Moon was only a way point in those days, and both sides had fully funded programs to go on to what was then seen as the real prize, Mars.

ep