Since this thread has jumped across the rails into the politics usually kept out of here:
It's been alternately amusing/bemusing/disturbing/enraging the past several days to hear one particular bat-brained candidate of one particular party spew out gooey runny bull-stuff about putting a colony on the moon, when his party has been attempting to strangle NASA with both fists for 50 years, they battled JFK tooth and nail when he proposed the Apollo program in 1961, they didn't want any of their tax money spent on that junk, they would have been deliriously happy to cancel Apollo on Jan. 21, 1969 if Apollo 8 had not made the circumlunar flight three weeks before, but they couldn't get away with it politically, they then started the shutdown of Apollo the minute Armstrong's boots hit the surface, then instead of a real manned space program, they mandated a penny-pinching, jury-rigged and inherently-unsafe (no escape system; guaranteed to kill full crews sooner or later) design for the shuttle, then a decade later when a shuttle blew up they refused to authorize a full-fledged next-generation launch vehicle, then 15 years later when another shuttle went down, instead of authorizing a viable follow-up program, they get up and say "Lookee here!!! Bright Shiny Lights!!! Let's Go To Mars!!!" (they might as well have said, "let's go to Krypton") and then immediately short-cut the development budget, utterly guaranteeing it would not meet ANY of its target dates, then when the next election rolls around they're all screaming, "You said we were going to Mars!! Why aren't we on Mars yet! Privatize everything!!!! NASA can't do anything right and I don't want to pay no taxes for nothin' anyway," and all of a sudden they are faced by an opposing president whose game plan is "punt, punt and punt some more, let's give them everything they want and maybe they will love me" so the U.S. manned space program gets deep-sixed. Starve The Beast. It only took them 50 years.