I had a quick look around, it seems that the European JIME mission is still on, Japan and Russia are interested in joining to provide magnetospheric study and a Europa lander, respectively. So it's not a total loss. I'd still rather see the US research community contributing though, saying that as a European myself. There's some serious expertise there.
Those missions were initially sold as being cooperative with the NASA Europa mission. Without the NASA mission it's going to be much harder to sell those missions to their respective national governments.
It's worse, it looks like they want to shut down Cassini early: http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2011/10/updates.html
The plan was to have Cassini end its mission by flying between the planet and the rings to do essentially the Juno mission at Saturn. NASA's already paid for Cassini, it's a waste to shut it down early... Juno was $1B, and Cassini could do the same thing at Saturn for pennies on that dollar.
It would have been nice if the summary had stated what OMB stands for somewhere (Office of Management and Budget). I was trying to figure out if it was some wacky new term for Obama or his administration.
This has been modded "funny", but seriously, no-one outside the US is going to know this.
You could google, or maybe read the article
It's not the administration's fault, it's Congress. NASA HQ and the administration didn't even want to build SLS -- they wanted to bolster the commercial launch market instead -- and were forced to do it by the Congressional committee.
If there's someone Lou Friedman should be complaining about, it's Senators Nelson and Shelby and their fixation on providing pork to large aerospace contractors in return for bribes, I mean campaign donations.
I would have hoped that someone in his position would be better informed, frankly.
Congress shares the blame, but OMB is part of the White House, and they are the ones trying to scrap the Mars program to pay for the big rocket. NASA is unable to get the cost of the rocket down, so the White House had three choices: 1) ask Congress to send more money to pay for their rocket or remove the mandate, 2) tell NASA to change its ways and built the rocket more cheaply, or 3) through the robotic missions under the bus. #1 probably would have worked because it's asking the powerful Senators who designed the rocket to send more money to their home states, but it would require Obama sticking his neck out for NASA, and what President is going to do that in an election year? #2 makes the most fiscal sense, but would have made enemies in the Senate and Congress (they don't care if NASA goes anywhere, they just want the money spent in their home states). So they chose #3.
NASA uses a lot of tax money and, with a population whose general impression of resemasearch is that it just giving money to boring nerds in labcoats (ignoring the economy generated by products of past research), they must do regular "America #1, Yihaaaa!" performances in order to keep the population from objecting too much against NASA funding.
I want to do Apollo Again! Apollo was very exciting. Everyone was excited.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4J9uvhJQM0
(youtube video about how exciting Apollo was)
Ubuntu has one of the brightest and smartest developers
Take him out for a beer and explain your concerns to him. I'm sure he will make some of the changes you want.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.