Yes, "aging vehicles" because there was no money in the R&D budget for a replacement program. What would happen to those project NASA dumps under your plan? NASA budget http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/508_2015_Budget_Estimates.pdf While $17.5B is a lot of money, in comparison to an annual Federal budget of $3.9 Trillion, it's only a fraction of the overall budget. The Social Security Administration has a $12B budget just to run the offices, to the outlay of cash. For something as important as the future of this nation and humanity, I think we should prioritize NASA a little higher on the budget. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2014/assets/budget.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_United_States_federal_budget
I agree, remember the years of the last great mission the Cassini. The attitude was "there is a great thing to do" not "let's see how much does it cost". If a good corporation puts a generous 2% in IT sector, Fed Government should make the same about space exploration. It would mean to triplicate NASA budget. Anyway a reduction of not strategical project of the agency would help.
Agreed on increasing the budget. Any specific programs you would want to see cut? Would they be dropped or moved to another department along with their budget?
With more resources those programs can be ended by NASA as well, but the large part of the additional budget should be more concentrated in the "core business" of the Agency. Just to say, why is NASA going back to launcher rocket tech to go back to the Moon, in the long term, and not to realize stations orbiting around Earth and Moon, starting a program of deep research on the satellite. Let's do something durable, for once!
They don't know this at NASA: to administrate space you need to be operative there, not here on Earth, paying foreigners to do something in the orbit.
