Jeff Foust points out some of the most hysterical responses to the rumors of the President's space plans: It’s silly season - Space Politics.

It really is amazing how many people still have the "NASA is Space, Space is NASA" paradigm cemented into their minds. Reducing NASA's direct role in designing and operating crew vehicles to reach LEO is perceived as "the end of human spaceflight in the US". An increase in NASA's budget is seen as a cut because the increase isn't gigantic enough to pay for a lunar landing by 2020.

The Augustine panel found that even with $3B a year increase in NASA's budget, the current Constellation program could not get to the Moon till the mid-2020s and even that requires deorbiting the ISS in 2015. It appears that the new plan will lay the basis for deep space missions to the Moon and elsewhere by the 2020s if not earlier. Yet somehow this plan means the end of human exploration beyond LEO.

I hope emotions settle down and reason returns when the full plan is laid out. I expect that at least some of the "stakeholders" in NASA, e.g. Brevard County, Huntsville, and Houston, will find it actually has a number of benefits for them.