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" None of this will happen. Not one of his ideas. Zip. Zero. Zilch. NASA's budget is a ripe plum waiting for plunder. When terrorists ignite a dirty nuke in Chicago or release Smallpox in Baltimore, kiss it good by. This nation will focus on terrorism and dealing with radical Islam, and NASA simply will not be on the radar screen, much less a priority. U.S. leadership in space is over "

Can't argue it seems over or at least put side ( space exploration)

But the truth is..this country was never better than when it had a frontier and the only frontier we have now is off this rock.If we don't realise it soon its gonna be like watching rome fall all over.

The next forty or fifty years will be spent fighting Islamic terrorism. What Bin Ladin and his ilk want is a huge Islamic empire circling the globe, and terrorism is just part of the picture.
It is interesting how the fate of the Soviet Union was pretty much sealed when they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. This accelerated a chain of events that fatally weakened the U.S.S.R. Now there is a new struggle. This new struggle had one of its defining moments when terrorists used Afghanistan as a base from which to attack the West.
We are no longer in a post Cold War phase. We are in a new war, that will have its "hot" and "cold" elements. A lot of strange things will happen -- perhaps some European countries will be taken over in an Islamic coup, perhaps Iran will have another revolution and become the first truly democratic Muslim country, and China, which has played both sides, will come to see radical Islam as a threat to itself and will grudgingly, half-heartedly, help the West.
What does this have to do with space exploration? I think the resources of many industrialized countries -- from America to, eventually, China, will be spent in various hot and proxy wars for the next half-century. Space will be forgotten except as a platform for communication and spying and, perhaps, weapons.
It is possible that our exploration of the moon happened a century too early. We did the right thing, but it was for the wrong reasons, and once the Cold War wound down, the space race quickly became a low priority precicely because science and the economic uses of space were never important goals.
We have too many issues to resolve on Earth before humanity can sustain space exploration. And by issues to resolve, I don't mean the liberal claptrap about the government putting a chicken in every pot -- no, the issue that has to be resolved is whether this century will indeed be the 21st century or whether we will revert to the 11th century. If it is the latter, the next manned flight to the moon will happen around the year 3,000.