I feel sorry for those "lifers" who administer the PS. I'm thinking of Bruce Murray,
Mr. Friedman, etc...They were so delusional they even had me believing that we were about to enter the Third "Golden Age" of robotic exploration of our Solar System with the PKE, EO, the
NGST, a slew of craft to Mercury to the comets and Mars including [sometime in the next decade] the Mars Sample Return Mission.
Now, the scales have fallen off my eyes: Just wait and see! One by one, all those
other glamorous "proposed & planned" deepspace missions will end up on the budgetary
cutting board in the coming years. That ISS "money-sucking-machine" is largely to blame,
so is Sept/11, but the taxpaying public's apathy, cynicism and jaded attitude is mostly at
fault.

Jacob