This article skews towards trying to make a political point, but it does so at the cost of truthfulness. It lays an elaborate case before the reader, detailing

This article skews towards trying to make a political point, but it does so at the cost of truthfulness. It lays an elaborate case before the reader, detailing the woeful state of NASA interplanetary science and the assumed perfidy of a stingy congress. This is a narrative that has only the slimmest hold on reality. Congress has done reasonably well at keeping NASA funded, with some occasional road bumps here and there. And certainly at a lower level than what many of us who value planetary exploration particularly highly would like. But still not too bad all things considering. The real cause for the pinch in planetary science is NASA itself. It has indulged in undisciplined budgetary behavior and project planning at the cost of diversity and robustness in its science missions. The major cause of these problems is something that is not mentioned once, even in passing, in this entire article: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). As of right now JWST is more than $7 billion over budget and 8 years behind schedule. That $7 billion compares to: 1 Curiosity rover ($2.5 billion) plus 2 Dawn double asteroid rendezvous missions (2x $500 million, 4 total asteroidal bodies visited) plus 1 Cassini mission ($1.4 billion) plus 1 New Horizons mission ($650 million) plus 1 Kepler mission ($550 million) plus an entire extra billion dollars. That's an exciting panoply of opportunities, and imagine those figures in the context of similar classes of missions. Ion engine powered comet-survey missions, planetary landers and rovers, Kuiper belt flyby missions, survey missions to Neptune and Uranus, exo-planet searches, and so forth. To say that NASA's space science missions have been sucked dry of funding is to ignore why and toward what end they have been. Make no mistake, JWST is a remarkably ambitious mission that is likely to be as groundbreaking as Hubble was, but it is absolutely squeezing the life out of the rest of NASA right now. It would be nice if congress would provide even more funding for NASA so they could go forward with JWST as well as other missions, but to implicate congress as a villain depriving NASA space science of life is to ignore the reality of the situation. This is a self-inflicted wound. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-aas-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-astrophysics-budget-20130108 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/08/science/la-sci-sn-aa... http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-nasa-budget-cuts-mars-exploration-by226/ http://blogs.agu.org/martianchronicles/2012/02/14/proposed-n... P.S. Moreover, the doom and gloom tone of the article is unwarranted. Regardless of either NASA budget mismanagement or congressional stinginess the capabilities of NASA in regards to exploration are set to vastly balloon due to the incredible reductions in launch cost on the horizon (from SpaceX and others).