NASA unveils sweeping new programs - manned rockets, deep space exploration

An interesting comment on this story, about NASA:

"They have been one of the big fuelers of my dreams for most of my life. I grew up in the Apollo years where we broke through one boundary after another and celebrated the early years of the Shuttle program where we created a system that is still unrivaled after 3 decades for it's ability to deliver and return payload to Earth.

Then Challenger blew up and along with it the spirit that was NASA. Instead, it was replaced by bureaucrats and risk managers. Everything involving manned exploration became so risk adverse that it amazing we have even managed to keep the program running today. If you have any doubt, look at Constellation, where we were going to basically replicate the accomplishments of Apollo, and take twice as long to do it and burn huge sums of money in the process. We can dream bigger and I am glad the current administration killed the program."

If we weren't constantly waging war on multiple fronts, we could give NASA a massive budget.

But when you are gushing $4+ billion a month, everything else has to be cut.

What they are giving NASA over the next five years, will be spent in just April+May in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Administration has also given NASA the go ahead to start reorganizing and reprioritizing Earth science missions in a sane manner. I happen to work on one, and the proposed changes we're seeing at the program level are like a breath of fresh air. They might actually decrease the amount of bureaucracy. Here's hoping Congress doesn't put the kibosh on them.