LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Maverick aerospace designer Burt Rutan on Thursday criticized NASA's decision to use an Apollo-style capsule to return to the moon, saying it "doesn't make any sense" to build a new generation of space vehicles using old technology.

The designer of SpaceShipOne said NASA's proposed crew exploration vehicle to replace the aging space shuttle fleet doesn't push the technical envelope needed to accomplish more complex future missions that might include manned flights to other planets and moons. "I don't know what they're doing," said Rutan, referring to NASA.

"It doesn't make any sense."

Rutan said there needs to be a technological breakthrough in spacecraft design that would make it affordable and safe to send humans anywhere in the solar system. But he said he doesn't know what that breakthrough will be.

"Usually the wacky people have the breakthrough. The smart people don't," Rutan told an audience at the International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles.

NASA is planning to return astronauts to the moon by 2018 and eventually send them to Mars. Unlike previous lunar missions, the space agency is studying possible areas where it can set up a human outpost.

Two competing contractors, Lockheed Martin and a team of Northrop Grumman and Boeing, each have contracts to develop conceptual designs of the crew exploration vehicle. The vehicle, which will be shaped like an Apollo-era capsule, will launched atop a rocket and return to Earth by parachutes.

NASA is expected to name a winner to build the vehicle by August.

NASA spokesman Dean Acosta said the crew exploration vehicle is a "fiscally responsible" project that achieves the space agency's goal of returning to the moon within its budget constraint.

"If you want sexy, it will cost a lot more money," Acosta said.

Rutan is currently building a commercial version of SpaceShipOne, which made history in 2004 when it became the first privately financed manned rocket to reach space.

Virgin Galactic, a British space tourism company, plans to take tourists on suborbital spaceflights using Rutan-designed rocketplanes launched from a proposed spaceport in New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn said the company is looking at possible future spaceports in the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Scotland or Sweden.

Virgin Galactic representatives recently visited Kiruna in northern Sweden to explore the possibility of launching suborbital flights that will allow passengers to see the Northern Lights, Whitehorn said.

Last summer, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Rutan, president of Mojave-based Scaled Composites LLC, agreed to form The Spaceship Company to build and market spaceships and launcher planes, licensing technology from a company owned by billionaire Paul G. Allen, who financed SpaceShipOne.