A tense issue

NASA administrator Charles Bolden, as you might expect, didn’t make much in the way of policy pronouncements in a speech Tuesday night at Purdue University. But in a Q&A with the audience after his speech he did stumble upon one issue: how do you refer to Constellation? “Orion and Ares are two components of a program that was called Constellation–or that is called Constellation,” he said, catching himself. He explained that he’s required under the FY10 appropriations bill to continue work on Constellation “although President Obama and I decided that that was not the program for NASA going forward.”
Later Bolden was asked what the problem was with the program that caused the administration to seek to cancel it. “Constellation was an incredible concept. The Vision for Space Exploration, I think, was really good,” he said. But, he said, “a strange thing happened, which is not unusual in our country: neither the Congress nor the administration chose to fund it.” The result, he said, was that when he became administrator Constellation had become a “lunar-focused” program without surface systems and “no vision, no possibility, that we were going to reach Mars or a NEO or anything else other than maybe ...