Florida Fires Back

Where we were going with the shuttle and our space program has been no secret for years, even decades. To suddenly wake up and blame Obama shows at the very least lack of preparation.

Where did they blame Obama for canceling the shuttle? It sounds like they are blaming him for canceling the follow-on program which he has proposed.

All this opposition to Obama's budget is not about our future in space, it's about jobs, pork and votes. We had no future in space with Constellation. It was a dead end and anyone who thinks otherwise is either naive, ignorant of the facts, or selectively ignoring the obvious. HSF was going to end when the Shuttle retires because Constellation would have been canceled in 2020 when Ares I was still not operational, the gap was up to 10 years, and the sunk costs exceeded $50 billion. Constellation had a plan and a goal and it was a complete and utter failure. It is beyond me why everyone insists that we need to have some fixed goal. In 2005, Constellation promised a return to the Moon in 2020 with an estimated cost a little under $130 billion. The current reality of Constellation is a return to the Moon well into the 2030's with costs escalated to $300 billion. If you think I'm exaggerating, just look at the program now. Five years after ESAS we are at PDR. At that rate, we will be at CDR in 2015 and doing flight tests in 2020, and that's just Ares I. Ares V and EDS and Altain could take another 30 years at that pace. And forget hardware cost estimates, look at budgets of $10 billion per year for 30 years and you get $300 billion to return to the Moon around the time that your children are retiring. What a joke. The only hope is to get NASA as far away as from HSF as possible, otherwise it will fail.

I agree about this being about jobs and pork. The rest of your post is garbage IMO, though.