LauraM wrote:

A couple of times, on different news shows, I've heard that Obama is
very interested in space ventures and that he may forgo going to the
moon in order to go to Mars. Has anyone heard this?

Obviously if he's having Norm Augustine do a review of Constellation
then the program is irreparably broken. Shuttle derived SRB powered
heavy lift is insanely expensive, has a very low flight rate at a very
high cost per flight, the SRBs are toxic, and probability of any one
flight failing is very high. Plus the moon and Mars are idiotically
expensive and unsustainable destinations in the near term - 2016.

Of course he's going to pull the plug, the question is what is he going
to replace it with. Obviously they'll switch to EELVs as a first step,
but my guess is we'll be looking at an equatorial commercial spaceport
serviced in the very near term by a reusable SSME powered EELV derived
launch vehicle, using Ares I upper stage technology, precisely as I have
previously published in my COTS proposal :

http://webpages.charter.net/tsiolkovsky/

An equatorial spaceport will bring the Star Trek era to low Earth orbit
and can serve as a staging point for the rest of the solar system, which
in any case is Phobos and Deimos, the asteroids and the planet Ceres.

The moon and Mars, not until after 2020, when he'll be out of office.

Nobody in their right mind would continue to support Constellation.