Cassini cost ~3.3 billion at launch in part because of several postponements. But, the delays introduced millions of dollars of extra costs a very small fraction of the total costs.

Still the software for the science instruments was built on the fly because they had run out of time and cash in that cycle. A postponement might have been better in that sense. The Huygen probe's launch/trajectory problem might have been noticed and fixed and would have prevented the lost of data we will have instead.

Have you bothered to check orbits for Cassini or do you just presume because it had a complicated trajectory it would be hard to postpone. The very fact it used the Earth, Venus and Jupiter for the extra boost could have made it easier to postpone and still reach Saturn near this time frame.

As I stated several times now Kerry asked for something that he probably knew he would not get. This is how politics works. He satisfied his obligations to his constituent and did no harm. He could have asked for an outright cancellation and could have made it his main focus and probably gotten it. To claim that Kerry is anti-space because of this is purely patrician politics of the lowest form.

He has a space adviser Lori Graver (a former NASA associate administrator and former executive director of NSS) and is far more friendly to science than Bush. Bush during 1999 didn't have a space adviser. He never visited JSC when governor and seemed complete uninterested in space till January of this year. Now he has not made any kind of effort to support his own new SEI and probably won't till after the election if reelected. Why don't we pay close attention to Bush and his lack of interest things space. The Republican National Convention is coming up. It will be the third or four time he could mention his SEI and get some coverage for it...I doubt he will...