“This is an administration that believes the United States is too prominent, to prepossessing, too dominant in the world. The human space flight program was the archetype of exactly what the current administration in its philosophy dislikes about America’s position in the world, and they want it to go away.”

To Obama’s most pointed critics, this policy reflects an ideological bias. “Whatever you thought about what we had, they replaced it with nothing,” says Michael Griffin, Bush’s NASA chief. “This is an administration that believes the United States is too prominent, to prepossessing, too dominant in the world. The human space flight program was the archetype of exactly what the current administration in its philosophy dislikes about America’s position in the world, and they want it to go away.”

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Nonsense, says Lori Garver, Obama’s space adviser during his campaign and now the deputy administrator of NASA. The Obama administration believes fully in human space exploration, she says, but Constellation was “unsustainable and unsound.”

But some of the president’s friends worry that, as Giffords wrote last year, Obama’s space policy “discards five years and $10 billion of development of the Constellation program and offers little in return.”

Even Griffin admits there is plenty of political blame to go around, noting that Bush-era underfunding made Constellation vulnerable.

Meanwhile, the space gap looms for the nation whose dominance of space began fifty years ago this month, when President John F. Kennedy announced before a joint session of Congress the bold ambition of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

Astronaut Michael Barratt notes that the Endeavour was named for the ship sailed by Captain James Cook on his perilous discovery voyage in 1769, and observes, “If you had gone back to Cook’s day and suggested that they stop sending ships out for a period of time while they huddled and designed a ship for the next generation, I think they would have all [chosen] suicide.”