Last year, President Bush established a goal for NASA that would put astronauts on Mars by 2020. This has naturally impacted (intended) NASA’s budget. Although the NASA budget will increase this year, many projects that are much smaller in scope than completing the International Space Station, creating a successor to the Orbitor, and working on the Mission to Mars are suffering. Unfortunately, many of these smaller projects advance scientific knowledge and understanding of the universe, and are being eliminated, or put on hold.

For example, NASA just announced that the project to visit two comets has been cancelled. Although the project costs nearly $400 million, in the scope of NASA, it is a smaller sized project. The Dawn spacecraft was supposed to lift off in June on a nine-year voyage to two of the solar system’s largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, which reside in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids are believed to be remnants from the solar system’s formation about 4.5 billion years ago, and studying them could provide clues into how the sun and planets formed.

Sending Astronauts to Mars, apparently is a more politically correct project these days.