No moon for you! Come back, 50 years!

On July 20, 1969, man took his first footsteps on the moon. They were carried there aboard the Saturn V, the most powerful rocket ever built, a record which stands to this day. It was the culmination of a challenge set forth by John F. Kennedy in his landmark speech on September 12, 1962: "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

Why the history lesson? President Obama's 2011 budget effectively ends the U.S. manned spaceflight program by cancelling Ares/Constellation/Orion and providing for no successor. The shuttle has four flights remaining on its launch manifest until its retirement to various museums around the country. We will remain at the mercy of the Russians to launch U.S. astronauts into orbit to the ISS. While some may argue that NASA received a budget increase, they also have no real program and no real goal. And we all know how well such plans work in successive presidential administrations. The President has allegedly heard the complaints, and has planned a speech for April 15th (tax day, ironic isn't it?) at the Kennedy Space Center, where thousands stand to lose their jobs once shuttle is retired without a successor to work on. Billions upon billions have been spent by this country for a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but giving up our technological and space leadership with the stroke of a red pen through a budget line item does not even warrant a public comment until April 15th, months after the decision has already been made?

I was not born in time to see the first moon landing, and it appears I will be long dead before another American lands on the moon, or Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system. How is it that the United States is willing to concede that for years to come, and possibly decades, we've simply given up on manned spaceflight? In 1969 we could land on the moon - and in 2010 we've just lost the ability or the will to do it? Ares I and Ares V may not have been the perfect answer, but at least we were still on track to have manned access to space. Maybe once the Chinese or the Russians start colonizing the moon, or traveling to Mars, the U.S. will see the error of its ways - and by then it will be too little, too late. We will be the ones trying to play catchup, having relinquished our lead in all things related to manned space exploration. Case in point - a large part of the cost of Ares I was attempting to reverse engineer Saturn parts, because while we have the blueprints, and we have production parts and samples, the reasons WHY parts were designed the way they were has been lost - the engineers are long dead, or retired. Things such as why valves had certain diameters, or why pipes had certain bend radii - all lost to dust and history. And now the cycle is again set to repeat with the retirement of the shuttle with no replacement on the horizon.

The ultimate future of mankind is off this rock. That would be change I believe in. Are you listening, Mr. President? All of humanity's eggs cannot live forever in this fragile little basket we call Earth. And circling the Earth in LEO at the mercy of another country's launch schedule is not progress, but madness.