Obama NASA policy

Read scathing critique here. The problem is simple, after the last shuttle flight, the US has no way to get astronauts into orbit. Current fix is to pay the Russians to haul our astronauts up to the International Space Station. This is distasteful, especially as it converts the ISS into a Russian space station. So long as the Russians control access to the station, they control the station.
Technical solution is straight forward. Build a spaceship to replace the shuttle.
NASA decided to start from scratch and design a brand new rocket booster and a brand new capsule. This is the high risk expensive way to do it, but doing new designs is fun. All the NASA people, who have been pushing paper for years, jumped on the chance to do actual hardware development. Actual hardware development is much more fun than pushing paper.
Instead we should purchase the rocket boosters that have been launching commercial satellites for years and build a capsule to go on top of it. Capsules, compared to Shuttle Orbiters, are simple and reliable. A simple one piece heat shield, an air tight hull, a hatch, attitude thrusters, a parachute, and a solid fuel retro rocket.
All simple off the shelf components that could be assembled and flight tested in side a year. This is cheap and dependable, unlike the Shuttle which is expensive and dangerous. In fact Shuttle retirement is happening because NASA has finally learned how dangerous and fears the PR disaster of another Shuttle crash.
The current Obama plan is to continue the "build a new launch from scratch" plan but only give it enough money to do paper studies. This avoids having to announce the end of manned US spaceflight and having to put any money into it.