>Congress is not killing this like they did the SEI. They're merely trimming most of
>the budget increase and withholding judgement until they get some cost estimates.

Ok, they may not be killing it, they just aren't funding it. The budget increase IS the initiative, the parts that count at least. And there is a lot of grumbling about the funding transfers within the existing budget levels. That's all functionally the same as killing it. That's how things usually get killed at this stage -- study, delay, just let it slowly starve and whither. Only if the President really pushes for it would you have to take a clear and explicit stance against.

I'll grant that it's *less* dead than SEI, but that was about the deadest proposal that ever haunted the halls of Congress. Fossilzed doorknobs are less dead than SEI. Did it ever even make it into a formal NASA budget request in a meaningful way?

Now, it's possible the Initiative will have some success in a negative sense: it gives the Administration some cover and rationale to fend off Shuttle life-extension programs or future ISS committments. The space program does have enough political support that no one wants to take the blame for ending it voluntarily, you're right on that score.

Where the political brilliance (even if unintended) of the plan is is that it probably does put us on an almost irreversible track to end shuttle missions (if we want to keep flying past 2010, we've got to start making some expensive upgrades and repairs soon) That makes ISS easy to walk away from, as does the fact taht it will no longer be talked up as being all that important as an end in itself.

Thus by 2009 or so the shuttle is out and ISS has spent several years being less than essential. At taht point, we only keep a program going if we start spending real money on something new, and that's easier to vote against. So the Bush's initiative makes it more likely that we'll have very little going on in manned space after 2010, vs the default situation where we probably would have kept Shuttle and ISS limping along towards 2020 (and then been faced with the same problem).