space tourism: no respect

We are so screwed. From my side of the field, looks like there are going to be a lot of NASA refugees knocking on the NSF's doors in the next few years.

As someone who works in science, I support everything that Griffin has done. Some of those "science" proposals are to probe things like inflation and "dark energy" which, to put it lightly, are not likely to pay off. My generation should be allowed to see people walking the Moon on TV.

Years? More like 2 weeks...

The science missions that have been hardest hit by the Exploration program are the planet finders and classical high energy missions - the Joint Dark Energy Probe has a very high probability of being one of the one or two major new science missions approved for the next 15 years, under the current budget. Details matter.

I actually support manned space, and would like to see people walk on the Moon again. And stay.
But if you are going to propose for stuff like that, then you must budget for it. Doing it on the cheap by scavenging other missions is a travesty.

What does this have to do with tourism?

"exploration without science is just tourism"

this seems to be the summary of the battleground issue