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Space, the outer frontier. At first it seemed we weren’t going. Manned spaceflight heard a familiar death knell. Budget cuts would effectively end US manned spaceflight for longer than this Space Bastard felt necessary.

But then a change of heart.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — Pointing to Mars and asteroids as destinations, President Obama on Thursday forcefully countered criticisms that he was trying to end the nation’s human spaceflight program.

Mars is promised as it was 6 years before.

Wait. What’s this now?

Strikingly, Mr. Obama used the speech to blame his predecessors for lacking leadership on space policy and the critics of his own plan for failing to recognize that times have changed. NASA’s budgets, he noted, have “risen and fallen with the political winds.” That appeared to be a shot at President George W. Bush, who announced a new plan for NASA after the Columbia disaster and barely mentioned space policy again for the rest of his presidency. And he argued that turning to private entrepreneurs would result in more space flights and more astronauts in orbit than the space plan he inherited.

Oh, you know that already. This renewed focus of NASA’s ambitions. The welcoming of private space ventures like Space X. Skipping over the moon to stab Mars. This is a better direction, yes?

While using Orion as a space station lifeboat may be politically savvy, some space experts, particularly those associated with the Constellation program, said the economic and technical rationale for the decision eluded them. It would take about $8 billion to finish the development of the current incarnation of Orion; a simpler version would most likely still cost several billion dollars.

“In the end, this seems like an expensive proposition that makes simply continuing to use the Russians for crew rescue look like a bargain,” Michael D. Griffin, the former NASA administrator who oversaw the creation of Constellation, wrote in an e-mail message.

Bollocks.

But wait, Stephen Colbert has been invited to Houston for astronaut training?

At least something good will come of this.

(via new york times, discovery news, colbert nation )