Jonathan Goff, a young rocket engineer, was a longtime poster to USENET's sci.space before the SNR dropped below recovery. In his new space blog he disses Griffin's Big Stick.

who in their right mind would want to fly on what is little more than the worlds biggest firecracker?

Some people wonder why I care. I work for a commercial space company that is making suborbital vehicles. We aren't involved with any of the contractors, and really aren't looking for NASA money. I'd like to see us do stuff related to lunar landers or orbital launch vehicles sometime in the future, but we're still on babysteps ourselves. Some argue that NASA's irrelavent, that we should just let them make stupid decisions that waste money, because at least that will keep them spinning their wheels and not actively impeding the alt.space community.

The problem is that NASA's decisions to try and do an Apollo redux does hurt the rest of us. It makes it more difficult for commercial companies to raise money, it perpetuates the myth that space needs to be hard, needs to be expensive, or requires big government agencies to do correctly.