Here.

A commentary that I have considerable sympathy with, here.

If you'd been in the business as long as I have, you'd be depressed, too. From the Times article:

John E. Pike, a space policy expert with the consulting firm GlobalSecurity.Org, said NASA needed to sell more people on the value of a moon program if it is to preserve future budgets and continue exploration beyond the Earth. The moon may be a source of the rare element Helium-3, for instance, which could fuel fusion reactors to provide abundant electricity on Earth, he said.

Aw, not the Helium 3 again. We can't even get deuterium and tritium to fuse to the point where we can make electricity from it. This is like Columbus selling the Queen on the New World because of the oil reserves over there.

NASA said the new crew vehicle would be 10 times safer than the space shuttle, partly because it will have escape rockets that could jettison the capsule away from the booster rocket in the event of an accident. The space agency puts the existing failure rate for space shuttles at 1-in-220, compared with 1-in-2,000 for the new vehicle.

Escape rockets! What a concept! Wow, that's a few billion in research right there. Geez...

If we had just proceeded with Apollo-Saturn to build space stations and continued lunar exploration and beyond, where would we be now?

Heck, come to that, if we had actually begun developing the obvious Shuttle-derived cargo launchers twenty years ago, where would we be now?

The ideal NASA project is one that required four hundred years of development. Research and development is what they DO. Turning out product is almost beside the point.

My predictions:

China, which could whomp up an assembled-in-orbit lunar expedition using old Soviet tech, will beat NASA to the Moon.

Some private entity in the U.S. will probably beat NASA, too. If the Falcon rockets work, it's going to get real interesting.