I'm not exactly on the same page as Grondine with tektikes, Martian geology, etc., but he's right that Simberg's article shows more hope and ideology than solid analysis.

As far as I can tell, Simberg's arguments are basically that:

1. NASA simply does everything in a slow, ponderous, wasteful, government way, using massively overdesigned hardware that is meant to serve multiple missions, and that makes space exensive.

-- I have no doubt that if you wanted to take some people up and down, without all sorts of fancy science, payload manipulation, etc., and if you didn't spend nearly as much time training astronauts for complex on-orbit activities, and if you cut a few safety factors here and there, you could send some guys into space and back for more like $50 million per launch instead of $500M. In fact, that is more or less what Soyuz is, or what CEV was suppposed to be. CHeaper than Shuttle to be sure but to get what Simberg wants you need to cut the cost of access 1,000 or 10,000 times, not just 10 times.

2. The key is using a vehicle often; the Shuttle WOULD be cheap if it flew more.

-- The point is that the SHuttle CAN'T fly much more. The reason the Shuttle is expensive isn't that we don't fly it weekly, the reason the Shuttle is expensive is that it turns out to need months worth of maintenance before each flight. This isn't surprising; a Concorde needed a heck of a lot more man-hours of preparation for each flight than does a 747. Since tolerances are tighter and redundancy lower than on a 747, because higher margins of performance are eeked out of the design, that makes sense. Just like an F-22 needs much higher maintenance than a 747.

Saying we just need to fly more is begging the question: the problem is that we don't yet know HOW to make a vehicle that will be reliable orbital transporation that you can service at your local airport in a day or two.

4. There's all this genius just waiting to be unleashed with prizes and incentives.

-- E.P. has the right response: if this is true, and if this knowledge has been sitting around for decades, then by all means, tell us!! I'm sure a different incentive structure would get some more inventors out there, maybe allow some aerospace firms to be more nimble, but the fact is this problem has attracted a hell of a lot of attention and a hell of a lot of money for a hell of a long time. It's just not reasonable to ask us to believe that some neglected group of engineer friends of his have solutions that will give us 10,000-fold reductions in launch costs but have just been ignored/suppressed. It's like the greens who say that Detroit knows how to make a car that runs on dirty dishwater and gets 500 miles/gallon, but that the vested oil interests keep the technology from going anywhere.

5. Rutan proves point #4.

-- By the same logic, Rutan "proves" that you can build an SST far more cheaply than Boeing could. Or it "proves" that you could build a 747 with range to circumnavigate the globe, twice the current range. Or that you could build a pedal-powered 747, using plastic wrap and balsa.

Rutan is a genius, no question. Done a terrific job of creatively acheiving some really hard things. I dont doubt he acheived those things for lower cost than Lockheed would have done. But Simberg ignores physics if he is arguing that SS1 is almost there. Even if it's true that anything Rutan does, he can do 10x as cheaply as anyone else, that still leaves us 100x-1,000x short of super-cheap orbital transport.