NASA may borrow a development approach from the U.S. Air Force and seek to build multiple prototypes of its proposed new moon landing craft, and then test competing designs against one another in a celestial version of an airplane designers’ fly-off. Retired Adm. Craig E. Steidle, the new head of NASA’s office responsible for developing the crew exploration vehicle, or CEV, has suggested that a fly-off competition might yield a better spacecraft in the long run, with the agency choosing the best-performing design over its closest competitor.

The new space initiative announced by President Bush has the odd distinction of being criticized both for costing too much and costing too little. Many commentators have denounced Plan Bush an insanely grandiose program that will waste $1 trillion dollars of tax money. At the same time, another group of critics says that it is a trivially small program whose funding level is utterly inadequate to achieve its announced goals of manned flights to the Moon and Mars. John Pike goes so far as to call the Bush Plan “a roadmap for the quiet and orderly phase-out of manned space flight.”