The whole point is it's something that doesn't work at the moment. It MIGHT work if you spend a few billion on it, or it might NOTt. In the latter case, you're a few billion down, deep in the quagmire, and everyone's muttering about inefficient government organisations again.

I know a lot about this sort of stuff - my work is in a field where we spend money and mantime looking at oil and gas prospects. Sometimes they get better with more work, and become drillable. Sometimes they get worse as we find out more about them. They turn to sawdust...

Some managers have an "assembly line" mentality and believe that more time and money spent on something will inevitably and inexorably make it better. This is completely untrue. You can never recover from a flawed basic design assumption, a law of physics, or a limit of materials properties. To change some feature that is at the heart of a rocket design means scrapping everything and going back almost to square one, since everything is so tightly integrated and co-engineered.

It helps to have some good gurus around who have the right instincts for what is likely to work and what is not, but in an ageing workforce like NASA, most of the gurus are now dead or pensioned off, and there never was a succession plan for them through the cost-cutting decades from the 70's onwards.

NASA has squandered its technical heritage, imho, and must start again from ground zero.

Part of that is NOT promising to fly unproven technology that will make missions "easy" Instead, you start with existing technology and make the size big enough to work. If the technology improves, you get more payload and more options.

Seems the mistake has already been made to force the size of the CEV and the new launchers to be based on existing technology and infrastructure, and then ASSUME that payload gains will come through technology improvements. NASA has pissed a lot of dollars down THAT particular hole. (And so have plenty of other companies and governments - NASA is not unique here). This is the "cheap today, expensive tomorrow" strategy. It normally fails, but politicians love it - they get to promise jam tomorrow, on a shoestring. Someone else can live with the future costs of their stupid short changing.