“Space thing,” because there’s no telling what it really is right now. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard who publishes the essential newsletter on space launches (Jonathan’s Space Report) raises some restrained but sobering questions about what will happen to NASA’s science mission under the Bush plan:
“… If …space science program funding is redirected to the (however worthy) human exploration program, it could be a major setback to our exploration of the wider universe.”