It's not quite that simple. Believe it or not, this might actually be a good thing for science and research at NASA. Since the president decided we should set our sights on a manned mission to Mars, other research has taken a back seat to research into effects of long-term space travel to prepare for a Mars attempt. For a notable example of this phenomenon, see the story from Sunday about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/02/1331251
Note also that Mars mission related research has been diverting resources from the Hubble, keeping it in it's seemingly perpetual state of almost doom despite the fact that it's still doing great science, and astronomers are still applying for time on it. All things considered, it might not be a bad idea to forcibly refocus NASA.
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It's not quite that simple. Believe it or not, this might actually be a good thing for science and research at NASA. Since the president decided we should set our sights on a manned mission to Mars, other research has taken a back seat to research into effects of long-term space travel to prepare for a Mars attempt. For a notable example of this phenomenon, see the story from Sunday about the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/02/1331251
Note also that Mars mission related research has been diverting resources from the Hubble, keeping it in it's seemingly perpetual state of almost doom despite the fact that it's still doing great science, and astronomers are still applying for time on it. All things considered, it might not be a bad idea to forcibly refocus NASA.