The last president to sit in the white house set some bold agendas for Americas return to the moon and putting a man on mars. He then proceeded to slash Nasa's budget by $10 billion.


Obama wanted to make another trim of about $3 billion, but decided to order a review of Nasa's plans for human spaceflight. The results are now in;

"The US's mission to return to the moon, with flights scheduled to begin by 2020, will have to be put off to beyond 2028 if NASA is stuck with its current budget, Ride warned. And the agency's replacement for the 30-year-old space shuttle will not fly its first crew into space until almost three years after the planned retirement of the International Space Station (ISS) in 2016, when the outpost will be dismantled and its constituent pieces sent careening into the ocean.

"It will be difficult with the current budget to do anything that's terribly inspiring in human space flight," said committee chair Norman Augustine, previously CEO of Lockheed Martin."

Is it time we start looking elsewhere for a commitment to space exploration? I'm disillusioned. Whole article here