Interesting article by a familiar name:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=893

Unfortunately, I disagree with his conclusions. Specifically:

I am going to go against all of my advocate friends and advocate a
second generation Shuttle to replace the current three remaining
shuttles that can meet the criterion laid down by NASA for the
Assured Access to Station program. A clean sheet design taking
advantage of over twenty years of operational experience would be a
much better and cost effective solution that would fulfill all of
the Orbital Space Plane requirements as well as the Assured access
program. Implement all of the upgrades and operational changes
recommended by various committees over the years and you could
build a very nice STS II that would be able to be semi-mass
produced and later mated to a flyback booster, resulting in a fully
reusable system. Boeing, in the form of the old Rockwell Downey,
the Shuttle's original builder, has done some good work in this
area.

This is failed space policy at its finest. This is the classic NASA
approach where Congress is to sign a blank check and allow NASA to
built a new space shuttle with all the bells and whistles that it
wants. It's hard to tell how many countless tens of billions of
dollars could be spent on this approach.

Since the middle of Apollo this approach has been flatly rejected by
both Congress and all administrations. The budget slashing began even
before the Apollo program was over. Face it, there will be no more
blank checks for space. We will never have a viable space policy
unless everyone accepts this as fact.

Furthermore, this approach has little to no chance of lowering the
cost of access to space. It contains within it the hidden assumption
of "performance uber alles" since you're letting NASA pick the design
and incorporate "all of the upgrades and operational changes
recommended by various committees over the years". It also contains
the implicit assumption that the shuttle should continue to carry both
crew and large amounts of cargo into space on every flight,
maintaining its "all things to all people" approach to functionality,
complexity, and high cost.

Jeff
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