Spacester IS absolutely correct. What the rest of you people don't seem to realize here is that NASA, like all the other discretionary spending or the federal government is just beginning to come under attack! <br /><br />If we in the space support community don't start to show a far greater degree of unity than before ALL the programs supported by either the manned space advocates OR the pure robotic scientific side are going to go poof!!<br /><br />Now, this may supposedly make the pure private start up company people happy, but they should realize that even such a giant in that area as Burt Rutan now believes that it may well be at least five to ten years before even he will get his efforts into LEO. It will be at the very least 2008 before Virgin Galactic opens up travel to sub orbital space, and both they and Burt Rutan will need to both establish the reliability and profitability of even this effort before even starting on the problem of orbital travel to LEO! As for the other leader in the field, Elon Musk seems to be realizing more and more that just saying things is not doing things! Now don't take me for wrong here, I DO fully support all of these efforts, and I think that eventually they will become far greater than ANY governmental efforts, but it IS going to take far more time than some of the enthusiasts on these boards think it is going to take to get there. In the meantime NASA is the ONLY game in town for this country at least!<br /><br />What some of the robotic scientific types don't seem to realize (and even congress seems to be aware of) is that it IS the manned program that most average relatively non science educated American Taxpayers look forward to. This is because they can see their progeny possibly becoming astronauts living and working in space, but quite frankly (and even Bush seems to realize this), and unfortunately, becoming a scientist running robots on the outer planets is not even close! In this case, "No Buck Rogers, NO bucks!