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Obama's Strategy to Kill the Space Program "...........'Here's my interpretation: the space program has always been a major liberal target, on the grounds that it "wastes money"

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.)......."

What's heart-breaking has been watching the starry-eyed folks so quick to embrace this administration's vision of "privatization," when very little analysis reveals this President's hostility to successful business and private property in every other area as well as his strong advocacy of moribund bureaucracies and central planning.

After all, what's the difference between SpaceX and Boeing? Aren't they both contractors? The regulatory atmosphere Bigelow, Orbital Sciences and SpaceX all face makes certifying a new passenger aircraft look like running a lemonade stand (outside any modern municipality, that is!).

Their agenda for the future of American manned spaceflight is as transparent as it is vague on destinations. The administration sought to bring a halt to Constellation primarily because its official architect was George W. Bush. Their profligacy will trillions make the cost overruns of the development of the Ares boosters and Altair lander look like bar-room spillage.

They have nearly succeeded in ceding on site resource utilization on the Moon and access to the surface of that natural "deep water" port to deep space to the Chinese, hobbling one of our very best infrastructural advantages, clipping our wings and draining our brain trust in an overt and demoralizing way.

Progressives and the Zero-Sum game central planners have openly despised NASA since Walter Mondale nearly crippled Apollo after the launchpad fire in January 1967.

One can guess what kind of reaction we can expect should the day come when one of these new contractors loses a vehicle and crew in a catastrophic accident