NASA is Not Dead:

This ain't your daddy's NASA anymore. It probably hasn't been for a while; I'm just not sure how long. The simple fact of the matter is: the manned space program is NASA's bread and butter; you take that away, and you kill the beast for most of us because we don't know what the hell NASA does, anymore. We know that we don't want Russian rockets. We don't want Korean, Chinese, or Indian aerospace. We don't want money to reach out to schoolchildren (because you know what reaches a schoolchild? Landing on the fucking moon.). We want American initiative, American design, American jobs, and American flags in red sand. We want America to move forward, whatever the hell that means. It's hard to feel like that's what's happening after today's cancellation.

To be fair, the 2004 unfunded mandates by the Bush Administration were by no means the kind of leadership we needed, despite the stated intention of returning astronauts to the moon by 2020. I don't care what anybody says: if we could do it in a decade fifty years ago, we could damn sure do it in fifteen years today. But not if nobody wanted to pay for it. Have we lost anything today? Probably not, given the abysmal state of the Constellation program. Have we been shown something of the truth as it has been for a long, long time today? I think so, it still smarts. Is it that we simply don't have the capacity to do what we did fifty years ago? That's what a lot of people think.

And yet here we are, doing even more. There's some 60-odd ongoing missions listed in my NASA app alone, and no telling how many more. Let me just give you a few examples of NASA today:

1. The Solar Dynamics Observatory is launching in a week. I bet you hadn't heard....

2. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter brings us images like this:

3. Huygens landed on Titan back in 2005, in what is certainly the single most remarkable thing NASA has been involved with (in partnership with the European Space Agency) in recent memory. Yet few people even know. This is an expensive photo, and worth every dime:

4. LCROSS finds water on the Moon last Fall. Pete Conrad didn't find any goddamned water on the Moon, right? (That's a joke, by the way.)

There's a cloud flying around right now that's hard to see through. This budget is a boon for everybody, says NASA. Listen to the teleconference and hear for yourself. This budget kills NASA, we of the media are wont to say. Constellation was a farce, anyhow, says Aldrin. Apparently, somewhere in there the line between bullshit and boilerplate was crossed. He endorses this budget, by the way.

So where the hell are we? I honestly don't know because I don't know what NASA is anymore. What will this heavy-lift rocket that is supposedly going to be developed be like? Nobody knows, because it doesn't exit! Not even on paper. Where is NASA going? Into space! says NASA. Nevermind how. Entrepreneurs. Commercial rigs. By international collaboration. Too many politics, few straight answers, and we who prize the glory days of the 1960's as a love lost, promised, and lost again are going to be very hard to please for a long time to come. Probably just about as long as it takes to get another American boot in Lunar soil.

**Update**

Get io9's opinion here. I'd just like to note that I'm reading Stephen Baxter's novel Voyage, right now. Ewww, bad timing...