American Science going down

[alphachapmtl]

American Science going down, American infrastructures going down. (too many wars?)

A recent New York Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/scien ... h_20120313

"Two ambitious missions that NASA had hoped to launch to Mars, in 2016 and 2018, will be canceled."
...
"President Obama’s budget request for 2013 calls for cutting NASA’s robotic exploration of the solar system by 20 percent, to $1.2 billion, and the Mars program would be particularly hard hit. Already, NASA has withdrawn from a collaboration with the European Space Agency that would have launched the missions in 2016 and 2018, angering the Europeans and disappointing astrobiologists and planetary scientists."
...
"But scientists are dismayed that they are being hamstrung on the brink of major breakthroughs."
...
“Right now NASA’s Mars science exploration budget is being decimated,”
...
“We’re not going back to the moon. Plans for astronauts to visit Mars or anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit are delayed until the 2030s on funding not yet allocated, overseen by a Congress and a president to be named later.”
...
"The sidelining of the Mars program is one of several depressing developments at NASA. The space shuttles will never fly again, and the agency’s reliance on Russian rockets to ferry astronauts to the space station is likely to be extended, because financing of commercial companies to take over that task has been limited. The James Webb Space Telescope, meant as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is delayed and over budget, now at least six years from being ready. The new heavy-lift rocket that is to take astronauts on faraway missions will not carry any astronauts until 2021. All of the big projects are slipping into the distant future."
...
"the cuts threaten the very existence of the Mars exploration program"
...

Another example of American science decline:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/
"The Tevatron, the world’s highest-energy proton-antiproton collider, shut down on Sept. 30, 2011."

[matthewota]

What we need is a change of administration, to a president that does not put our space goals out of reach to some future generation.