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Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Cassini - these were the so called "Flagship" missions - big, envelope-pushing missions intended to substantially advance our knowledge of the solar system. (MSL is really another, but Mars is special for NASA and so they don't call it that.) They have somewhat fallen out of favor, as they are very expensive and prone to delays and overruns, but it is hard to see how there can be substantial advances, particularly in the outer solar system, without them.

The next mission of this class will, Congress willing, be the Europa-clipper, which is slowly getting to the AO stage. I can hardly wait.

Can but won't. Saying a heavy lifter will be chosen in 2015 is doublespeak for never. If NASA was really meant to send somebody somewhere it would have most likely only meant Ares-I gets canceled and serious Ares-V development begins.

(allow me to recycle a comment of mine from a few days ago)

You don't need a heavy lifter for space exploration. In fact, it just eats up the funds you'd need for actual exploration. There's a reason that each of the times that a country has developed a heavy lift rocket in the past it's been canceled after a handful of launches due to being far too expensive. Heck, the US's and world's current heaviest launcher, the Delta IV Heavy, has only been launched 3 times in the 6 years it's existed, and it's much smaller than the 160mt Ares V design. Unlike the Ares V, the Delta IV infrastructure is also useful for medium-lift launches; with the Ares V you'd have to spend billions of dollars a year paying the standing support army and maintaining infrastructure even when you're not launching anything.

A better alternative is propellant depots, allowing you to use smaller, pre-existing launchers and refuel in space to get to where you want. Propellant depots play an important role in NASA's new plans:

http://selenianboondocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Depot-Centric_Human_Spaceflight.pdf
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=230949/Section4.pdf

Pick a heavy lifter that can get the job done, put some intelligent technial people in charge of it, give them the money and resources to get it done, and LEAVE THEM ALONE for the next decade.

You don't need a heavy lifter for space exploration. In fact, it just eats up the funds you'd need for actual exploration. There's a reason that each of the times that a country has developed a heavy lift rocket in the past it's been canceled in a few years due to being far too expensive.

A better alternative is propellant depots, allowing you to use smaller, pre-existing launchers and refuel in space to get to where you want. Propellant depots play an important role in NASA's new plans:

http://selenianboondocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Depot-Centric_Human_Spaceflight.pdf
http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=230949/Section4.pdf

Right after I made the submission, it looks like NASA released info on Commercial Crew Transportation and the Exploration Precursor Robotic Missions. I probably won't make a separate submission (although someone else is more than welcome to), but the new docs are pretty interesting:

http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/solicitations/solicitations.do?method=init&stack=push

They couldn't have really developed all of this since the announcement of the cancellation of the Constellation program.

Seems more likely they just grabbed a bunch of already developed tech and slammed it together.

On the plus side, the fact that they're actually focusing on this tech which I heard they were developing years years ago, at least for the ion propulsion and inflatable structures, shows that NASA is finalyl getting off their feet and working on them.

Keep in mind all of these technologies have been on NASA's back-burner for a while (and most/all had their funding cut when Ares/Constellation started going over-budget). These "Flagship Technology Demonstrators" are also specifically targeted towards technologies which are already of mid-level maturity but have never been brought to the point that they could be tested in space before. There's a figure on page 2 of this document which does a pretty good job of explaining things:

http://nspires.nasaprs.com/external/viewrepositorydocument/cmdocumentid=230964/Section1.pdf

Jeez, the mantra continues.

Last year the earth cooled ALLOT
Arctic sea ice has been GROWING
The Green house gas argument is a number scam. (Ponzi anybody?)
And unless we get allot more sunspots soon, we be PRAYING for a little global warming.

On top of all that, the psuedo scientist out there call people that present these FACTS "Flat Earth'ers".

Wake up people, you are being taken for a ride.