It's official, NASA will not lead us back to the moon and beyond

And Barack Obama will fight those who oppose him on it:

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is canceling NASA's current space shuttle replacement- and lunar exploration-plan and is prepared to fight any congressional effort to save it, the nation's top budget official said Jan. 31.  

During a teleconference with reporters one day before the White House was to send its 2011 budget request to Congress, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer confirmed Obama's plan to kill NASA's Constellation program, a five-year-old effort to replace the aging space shuttle fleet with new rockets and spacecraft optimized to return astronauts to the Moon.

"...[W]e are proposing a cancellation of the Constellation program at NASA even while making other investments in long range [research and development] there, which again is a significant step," Orszag said in response to a reporter's question about the tough choices Obama faced in drafting his 2011 spending plan.

The key elements of Constellation include the Orion crew capsule, its Ares 1 launcher, a larger rocket dubbed Ares 5 and the Altair lunar lander. Obama's top-line spending proposal for NASA is expected to increase slightly over the 2010 appropriation of $18.7 billion and would including some funding for an alternative means for transporting crews to and from the international space station.

Orszag said that in addition to research and development, NASA's proposal invests in "advance robotics and other steps that will help to inspire Americans and not just return a man or a woman to the Moon but undertake the longer range research that could succeed in human spaceflight to Mars."

AJStrata believes he knows why this is happening:

Is there some special reason (or corporate buddy) driving the White House to throw away all the work (and money) to date, and go with a solution 33% more expensive? This smells of funneling money at great taxpayer expense to me.

Or is this just more childish Bush Derangement Syndrome at work? That seems likely.

I should have known better. Anyone who thinks they can re-architect the dynamic, innovative and enormous health care system of this nation is clearly delusional and suffering from a demigod complex. Since they are pretending to be doctors and nurses, I guess pretending to be astronauts, engineers and entrepreneurs is not a surprise (since none of them have a clue what those careers are all about either).

All I know was I was hoping mankind would return to the stars in my lifetime, as we did with the Apollo mission and John F Kennedy’s dream of visiting the Moon (I was 9 when humans first stepped on the Moon, I was 12 when the missions stopped). Obama the job killer is also Obama the dream killer. Heaven help us these next 3 years.

Radical anti-Americanism is in charge now folks... your hope and change.

Comments

[Locutisprime]

I believe that he is leading us to infinity and beyond.

[BroKen]

Actually, this might be a blessing in disguise. Burt Rutan thinks that government involvement in aerospace (that's NASA) has stifled advancement over the last few decades. You can find his talk on TED.

So, less government could be a good thing even (especially?) for rocket scientists.