Far, far sadder is the fact that ...we are not going back to "cans on a stick". We are going to nothing. Zip. No future. 4.5 decades of USA leadership in human spaceflight flushed down the crapper......
The political stuff violates forum rules, so won't touch that part. I also tend to avoid the non-FJR posts, but timely to the part about changing course on NASA's future...
I work occasionally with NASA folks and had a talk last Friday with one of the top people in NASA planning. He was telling that even before this administration and the Augustine Commission, management and the administration knew that the Constellation program was unworkable in the funding it'd been given and projected. He was absolutely right. I distinctly remember a similar lunch at an Aging Aircraft Conference and sitting with a NASA bunch of folks years ago when there was an announcement that the funding of long-lead parts for new external tanks had been cut. The room was stunned. We all knew then that Connie couldn't move fast enough and there'd be a period of years without manned flight. It's really hard to believe that the sad day is here.
Basically, the funding idea behind Constellation was to see how far they could get before the money ran out and expect the new administration would pick things up, which meant that Constellation would need a big increase in NASA funding. Handing a hot potato to a successor of any party is an OLD game in DC and thanks to beaurocratic inertia and spreading jobs around voting districts, the tactic usually works. This isn't a red vs blue issue, because both parties do it constantly. Just like with funding manned space, sooner or later the game can't go any farther without a big change. For examples, look at any number of military programs. Ever heard of the
Crusader tank or the
Boeing/Sikorsky Commanche helicopter?
What killed the Connie program was the Augustine Panel's recognition of three things. One was that simply lifting people was becoming all-consuming on the NASA budget and was far less efficient than robots. Second was that the deeper space missions and research that NASA is known for were near death, largely due to all the money going to the 40 year old technology in the shuttles. I've seen some NASA facilities that look like run-down mill-towns, so have to agree. Third was that current technology can't move enough weight onto the surface of Mars or even worse, back off. The thought was that the technology
hopefully could be developed before it was needed!!! Without that part, why bother with Constellation?
There are some promising technologies that probably will work, but they need to be figured out first. That's what Augustine recommended and Obama's now committed us to, like it or not. In short, Augustine said that NASA got screwed financially for so long that it broke to the point it needed to be re-defined. But things aren't as bleak as you wrote, either.
The two upsides are that (1) funding's going UP for NASA finally, and (2) that when people do go back to space the technology will have made a serious improvement. We're entering a boom for robotics and those who build smaller rockets, building toward manned flight returning. We need to figure out better faster/heavier ways to fly first. Something you missed and that I hope as a Nation, is that we come back to supporting NASA when people see US astronauts on Russian rockets, or whatever China's "next big thing" will be.
This is going to totally suck for you folks in Florida. While I'm with the group that thinks that we're killing shuttle years too early or that we should already have the shuttle's successor, what got us here has taken decades of starvation, through multiple administrations. This won't be the first time that the end of a program hurt an area, but that thought won't help a lot of people who will be forced to uproot their lives. As an engineer, I got laid off at the end of a Lockheed program and then again at my next job at Hughes. Plenty of Seattle people remember the billboards asking for the last person out to turn off the lights. They made it through.
Besides, there's only one Cape to come back to. All those little robot rockets will need to launch, too.
k: 
