This doesn't surprise me. I've long had a feeling--without anything firm to back it up--that if NASA's existence were put to a national referendum, it would be gone. People tend to concentrate on the space at the end of their nose, not the space above the atmosphere.

Whatever the VSE amounts to may well be NASA's last hurrah. Once the agency folds, I'll bet that America will be out of the human spaceflight biz...too expensive a proposition for the private sector when robots give the best ROI. The communists and socialists will inherit the universe, but even that's probably not enough to spur us forward.