It is pretty depressing knowing that this is nearly the end for NASA's shuttle fleet. I watched discovery land yesterday, for the last time, and couldn't help but feel depressed.
Only two more shuttles are scheduled to leave Earth, one flight each for Atlantis and Endeavour and then mothballed off to museums; the USA will no longer have the capability to put a person in space for an undefined period of time, but likely many years.
The Constellation program, initiated after the Columbia disaster, which was basically just Apollo 2, has been more or less canceled; not such a bad thing, it was underfunded and uninspired-- but where is the inspiring replacement? The current plan is to promote commercial space flight in the hopes that it will produce a cheaper more efficient path to manned space projects.
It seems to be a common misconception that NASA takes a large percent of the federal budget, but the actual number is closer to half of one percent.
Here are the numbers, as you can see US budget is $3.55 trillion, and NASA receives only $18.7 billion of that.
That is 1/190th, or ~0.005%.
That is a pretty damn small percent. Politicians waste more money on pork barrel projects each year than the entire budget of NASA.
