[Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA)]
They've come very close to accomplishing this. The Shuttle is now history. There is no near-term replacement. Mars is off the table. The NASA team that kept the U.S. in the game is being dispersed, with a small remnant retained for work on the Orion project, scheduled to fly by 2016, though we'll see inevitable "slips" from year to year.
A favored liberal method of shutting down anything they are opposed to is the "replacement" technique. They insist on replacing the program in question with an alternative that is nowhere near as good but which mollifies the opposition. Then, once a little time has passed, they shut down the replacement while ridiculing opponents for trying to put over something so second-rate and useless. We saw this most recently with the F-22 v. F-35 debate. F-22 Raptor production was shut down on the grounds that the F-35 would act as a "replacement." Now, several years on, we're hearing that the F-35 is simply "not good enough." One of Panetta's first moves in the Department of Defense will be an attempt to shut it down. (For some reason, both the Republican Party and the conservative establishment have found it very difficult to wrap their collective minds around this process. The libs pull it time and again, and each time it comes as a surprise. I'm not sure why -- it doesn't strike me as being particularly complex.)......."
But will we see Uranus ?
Why do we need the space program?
“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collpase is not far away. It s time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it [will make] it possible to go elsewhere.” -Robert A. Heinlein, “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.”
Neptune, the other blue planet.