With Constellation getting knifed, =anything= else is gravy as far as I'm concerned. Good riddance to an empty rhetorical gesture by Dubya in a pathetic attempt to be the 21st Century JFK. There was NEVER any funding for it, and the only positive result was the finally force the retirement of the ludicrous, dangerous, and ridiculously expensive STS. Sure, it makes awesome eye candy, but you got that in '81. Going back to the moon would be an empty gesture that would also burn through huge sums of money. I'm glad the charade is finally over. The only useful thing it would have provided would have been a heavy-lift booster capable of pushing 50 tons to Mars.
For NASA to actually get a $6B /INCREASE/ -- on the previous year's budget of only /$13B/-- is absolutely fantastic, far better than I dared hope for. (Yes yes, the $6B is spread over 5 years. So it's only an annual increase of 9% over the 2009-10 budget, every year for the next five years.)
My own interest is Mars; this budget raises the possibility that the next decade need not be a re-run of the data drought we suffered in the 80s and much of the 90s. (At the moment, there are only two Mars landers: Mars Science Laboratory, the gigantic nuclear-powered laser-armed beast, of which there is only one, and which is supposed to land with one of the most bizarre EDL systems I've heard of. Search for it on YouTube and prepare to shit yourself as you realised that there's just the one shot for it to work, or the $3B MSL gets lithobraked. Anyway, after that there's a vague plan to land TWO rovers in 2016: one by JPL and one by ESA, on the same vehicle. As the ESA rover, aka ExoMars, has been in development for well over a decade and has repeatedly slipped - in fact it's slipped further than it's been in development, I believe - I put the chances of that coming off at no better than 20%. AND THAT IS ALL. Ridiculous when you remember that the two MERs that are still running today, in the sixth year after landing for a planned 90 Sol prime mission, cost less than two Shuttle launches. I know what kind of footage and images *I* would like to see on the TV news in 5 years time, and it's doesn't include fleshy ones floating around clogging up the view.
Anyone in the "space community" (meaning the non-professional interested people, e.g. those posting on this thread) who's moaning about the NASA budget at this point either hasn't been paying attention, is a whacked out 60s reject suffering an acid flashback, or has been watching too much Star Trek.