Two Views: Where Have We Been – Where Are We Going?

America’s space program is crashing, opinion, Mark Albrecht, Washington Times
“The conventional wisdom in the federal bureaucracy is that you can reduce spending or you can restructure, reprioritize and reorganize. You can cut programs or start new programs. But you can’t do both. Now, our backs are to the wall. To re-establish our leadership in space, we must defy conventional wisdom and cut spending, start new initiatives and radically restructure a mature agency – all at the same time. It won’t be pleasant, and it won’t be easy, but neither was putting a man on the moon.”
NASA’s new journeys, opinion, John Holdren and Charles Bolden, Politico
“One misimpression is that the U.S. human spaceflight program is stalled. The truth is quite the opposite. Soon after President Barack Obama took office, an independent commission concluded that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s then-existing plan for the post-Shuttle era was not viable under any feasible budget scenario.”