from the article : 'the newly created Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships or “NextSTEP” program'
They might have just googled for their abbreviations first, so that they wouldn't collide with an important historical operating system [0]. I get that it's hard to find an unused three-letter acronym, but with 8 characters you really should be able to find something unused.
To be fair as time goes on we're going to have collisions more and more to the point where I think we'll either stop caring about collisions or we'll stop caring about creating abbreviations / acronyms. I'm hoping for the latter :)
They might have just googled for their abbreviations first, so that they wouldn't collide with an important historical operating system [0]. I get that it's hard to find an unused three-letter acronym, but with 8 characters you really should be able to find something unused.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP