Lots of headlines about killing funding for a mission to the moon and lede gafs like this:
NASA's grand plan to return to the moon, built on President George W. Bush's vision of an ambitious new chapter in space exploration, is about to vanish with hardly a whimper. With the release Monday of President Obama's budget request, NASA will finally get the new administration's marching orders, and there won't be anything in there about flying to the moon.
That's kinda true and kinda misleading. The program is Constellation. It consisted in part of two new rockets, Ares 1 and Ares V. It's true that an interim stop for Constellation was the moon, but as the name Ares suggests it was really about going to Mars.
Total estimates for the moon to Mars idea went as high as 100 billion dollars over twenty years. That kind of funding, an extra five billion plus a year for an agency with a budget of about 19 billion a year, just never materialized. Unfunded, Constellation would force NASA to cut way back on scores of other exciting projects. Separately, broad based concern soon emerged that even with full funding, since Mars is really, really far away compared to the moon, going there using the souped up 1960s lunar methods proposed for Constellation was doomed to fail.
So, yes, this policy change signals NASA will save taxpayers billions by redirecting money away from a grossly underfunded, unworkable, twenty year moon to Mars concept. They will get a budget increase in the form of a big fat stimulus injected straight into the heart of cutting edge aerospace capitalism (New Space) and eventually purchase launch services for a fraction of what Constellation/Ares would have cost.
As you might expect, conservatives love them some privatization and hates them some Big Government Wasteful Spending, except when Obama does it and it affects their own constituents:
"It's a matter of priorities," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. "We can find that money in other parts of the budget."
[Kay Bailey Hutchinson] -- "very short-sighted. ... We've already made such an investment."
[Rick Perry] -- said he "could probably find a lot of earmarks where billions of dollars were spent" on projects that didn't help the Texas economy nearly as much.
Rep. Pete Olson, a Sugar Land Republican whose district includes the Johnson Space Center, also wants Obama to reconsider.