Jon: Certainly government has a place where only it can do certain things, such as a space program. To suggest the Bush administration is deliberately trying to sabotage (gut) federal agencies is irresponsible and unfounded. This is left wing blogosphere paranoia, please leave it there. This a bit inappropriate for this board and over the top. I would love to read your views on science and astronomy but leave the politics off this board please. Robert Taylor Dale, Without the "government" you would not have NASA. Without the "government" you would not have NOAA. Without the "government", you would not have the EPA or any other federal entity that worked fairly efficiently and prudently before the Bush administation hired their "anti-science" hacks to head said government entities. The plan of the Bush administration all along was to gut these federal entities to show the American people how ineffectual the federal government is. Look at FEMA and Hurricane Katrina for a perfect example of this type of right wing ideology. The worn out right wing argument of telling the "government to get out of the way" is not only wrong, but foolish. Another perfect example is the almost $1,000,000,000,000.000 of U.S. tax payers money that has been transferred from public hands into private hands. Now the same greedy, right wing, venture capitalists who have run our economy into the ground based upon their diatribe of deregulating the markets, and telling the "government to get out of the way" are now running to the seek the shelter of that same "government" to bail them out of the economic mess they have created. Its funny, that right wingers called Obama a socialist when he introduced his tax plan. But those same right wing ideologues did not complain when they went "hat in hand" to beg for a government bail out. This is occuring again and again. Look at GM and Chrysler and Ford. These companies are just a small example of the massive bailout hoax that is being perpetrated upon the American people. The free enterprsiers are a joke. They want to live their ideology so bad, yet they will unabashedly make like the corporate welfare queens they truly are and run to the federal government for help. Socialists indeed! True free enterprise is dead and has been dead for decades. And as far as the planetary probes that another person had mentioned, these probes would not have been funded if left to the vestiges of the Bush administration. Thanks for your time. Jon