because the current President didn’t come up with the VSE, it wasn’t his policy. The current President didn’t pick Griffin to come up with a shuttle replacement. When Griffin came up with the “stick” and Ares V that didn’t utilize the old shuttle parts, like Direct does, it was the last president’s problem to have stopped it.

I have written several times about faults, I believe, the current President has made, including 3 articles on failure of using the stimulus for commercial space development. That is mixing apples and oranges though. So far NASA’s budget has seen increases not gutting under this President, and since he has not articulated where human space flight is going the jury is still out on what is going to get “gutted” if anything.

President Obama has never used Constellation or Ares I & V in any public policies so it is still speculation if he is going to cut them, delay them or ask for increase funding to support them and cut the gap.

And if current POTUS is serious about space, why didn’t he carve a few bill off the $787B Bank Exec slush fund and do the same?

Perhaps because the POTUS in today’s America, does not have the pull everybody everyone credits him (or her) with. Perhaps we should place this blame with a failure of Congress (the Board) to follow the Vision of the POTUS (CEO).

“decimation of Earth science programme at NASA” – Are you kidding me? Give me a break. NASA has a “flotilla” (their own words) of Earth observing satellites. Ever hear of the A-Train?

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cloudsat/multimedia/a-train.html

Yes, There is doom and gloom about these being past their design life, but that’s just marketing. Historical data shows these satellites last much longer than their original life, as much as five-times longer.

There was a four year gap in manned spaceflight capability from day one. Regardless who became President unless they totally scraped “the stick”. Staying with that may lead to an even greater then four year gap, outwards to 2017. Again, nothing to do with President Obama.

If President Bush was really serious about space why didn’t he pour the 230 billion dollar budget surplus he was handed by Clinton and fully fund a replacement for the shuttle AND a fully funded lunar architecture.

“We need to manage the balance between looking up and looking down, the Earth observation part versus the space exploration part.”

Which to me says the “looking down” part is more important than the “looking up” part, so NASA will be used more and more to promote and support AGW Theory and climate research, and as a result US space technology and programs investment will decline and the US will end up without a manned spaceflight capability.

We’ve got four years of this…indeed “we can only hope”. We can only hope there’s still a country left when the Democrats get done with it this time.