well that's it boys and girls...
NASA is officially dead. The ISS is set to be decommissioned in a few years (believe it or not) the shuttle is being retired very soon, and with the Constellation program canceled, The United States...has just lost our manned space capabilities. Looks like in a few years we'll be depended on the Chinese to send us to space too.
This is one of the dumbest times to do this as well. We've already developed a hell of a lot of technology, and invested a ton of money in this program, and now it's all gone to waste.
And the need for manned space missions is because there are a lot of things that robots can't accurately do. We did sent robots to the moon, and they didn't provide half the info the humans did.
NASA got too good at using robots, and too bad at using humans. The robots were able to do too much, and so people lost interest. If a human isn't actually doing something, people aren't interested. NASA sucks at PR. They were landing on the goddamn moon, and the world just fucking moved on. It became routine, and no one cared anymore.
short and simple....this is an awful decision, and has killed American manned space programs.