A plan to send a spacecraft that will land on Titan and float on its ethane oceans is about the most ambitious space program I've heard of since we landed on the Moon.  Let's see if it actually gets funded.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,566227,00.html

"A man never drinks anything that a plant lives in" --DBone (A Real Man).
http://vimeo.com/4938173

I'm hoping it doesn't. With all the debt we have now, I'd rather we didn't spend the money to fund unnecessary projects.

The entire NASA budget is a drop in the bucket.  This nation needs to continue moving forward in investing in science or we shall fall behind.

"A man never drinks anything that a plant lives in" --DBone (A Real Man).
http://vimeo.com/4938173

Yep, we gotta keep exploring though I would prefer to see missions to the moon oriented towards colonization by a science community and with the goal of going to Mars. Going to the environs of Jupiter seems far to big of a step before we even demonstrate out ability to get people to much nearer Mars and back.

The moon is the first step with the establishment of space telescopes there with a small sustained team. Imagine what a Keck interferometer observatory could see from the a place with no atmosphere and where, if were placed correctly, it could be used 24-7-365. Hubble would instantly be considered prehistoric technology.

For over 40 years now we have been in a holding pattern in manned exploration of space. We went from exploring out moon to doing nothing but sending glorified buses and now a bus station to work only in the confines of our own planets orbit.

Actually, the far side of the Moon represents the best location in our entire solar system for a radio telescope. Shielded by the mass of the Moon from both the radio bright spots of the Sun and the Earth a large telescope there could finally pick up similar radios, if they are out there, from other life in the solar system.

"A man never drinks anything that a plant lives in" --DBone (A Real Man).
http://vimeo.com/4938173