I think Gary hits the nail on the head re the Bush plan. I don't know that I'd go so far as to think it is totally a cynical exercise, not in everyone's midn at least. But it does set us up for a dissapointing scenario.

All it really calls on for Bush's second term is

- putting Shuttle and ISS on a glide path to termination.
- Delaying and re-scoping the OSP as the CEV
- Adding a lunar probe (but deleting some astrophysics and Earth science)
- Beefing up the nuclear systems initiative

The big ticket items are all after 2009.

Politically it would have been very hard to pull the plug on the shuttle/ISS without something to replace them. Presidents may not care much about space but no one wants to be the guy who shut out the lights and packed it back to Earth. Thus all the craziness about keeping the shuttle flying until 2020, a focus on ISS as far as the eye could see, etc. It's ironic that for all Goldin's revolutionary talk the whole plan under him was to just keep kicking the cans down the road.

The Bush people may be serious, or think they are serious, about this plan. I think they are quite sincere about nuclear systems for bigger, better robotic missions -- one of O'Keefe's first actions was reviving nukes (and rightly so!). But at this point they don't *have* to be serious.

The big change in the near term is establishing that Shuttle/ISS are NOT the future of NASA. WE're setting ourselves up for a different future, but it won't be until closer to 2010 that someone has to decide whether that's really the path we're going to follow, or whether we're just going to stay home for a while