NASA RETRO

I agree that political decisions damage NASA, but hey, that ain’t nothing new.  It’s been that way since JFK.  All Gov’t agencys deal with that; NASA ain’t no different.  NASA faces many problems for its manned program, but the biggest is that all the low hanging fruit has been picked and they don’t have an achievable long term goal.  They have done the low earth orbit manned stuff and have done the man on the Moon thing.  There are no new easy and affordable manned missions left which are worth doing.  A manned mission to an asteroid?  Why?  Asteroids come to use every day.  Manned mission back to the Moon?  Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt……..  Manned mission to Mars?  Two orders of magnitude more difficult than a manned moon mission and with the economic future of the US, there will never be money to fund it.  IMO, the focus should be on quickly redeveloping the US’s capability to carry men/supplies to the Station, HST II and un-manned robotic missions to the other planets and their moons.  That behemoth that Bolden rolled out is a pieced together junkyard rocket without a purpose.