So even Neil Armstrong has a beef with the president:

The first man on the Moon has teamed up with the last man, Gene Cernan, to confront President Obama over his “devastating” plans for Nasa’s $108 billion (£70 billion) Constellation programme. Mr Obama wants to scrap Constellation, which was meant to develop new space ships to replace the shuttle, take astronauts back to the Moon and ultimately to Mars.

The death of the project would set America’s space programme on a “long downhill slide to mediocrity”, Armstrong declared yesterday. “It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to re-create the equivalent of what we will have discarded,” he said in a statement.

Gizmodo, the fantabulously popular tech site, has a longish piece mourning the death of JFK’s dream (language alert — some people are very passionate about this).

NASA was the very first place I ever dreamed of working for. When I was a kid, the sci-fi of Star Trek was quickly becoming the sci-nonfi of July 21, 1969 — and I wanted to design spacecraft. In elementary school I could name all the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions before I could name all the states’ capitals. (And I still get Oregon’s wrong.)

This generation of kids, however, will have to dream of working for the government in other capacities, like used-GM-car salesman, or perhaps branch out into the expanding field of debt-consolidation advocacy.

I’m almost tempted to say, “Save us, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re our only hope.” Almost.