No shuttle will be bad, you'll see

The New York Times has an editorial about the changes at NASA:

President Obama’s call for sweeping changes in the space program got mugged by lobbyists and pork-minded legislators. An authorization bill for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that cleared Congress will leave the agency mired in past technologies.
Mr. Obama shocked Congress and the space industry when he announced plans to abandon the Bush administration’s goal of landing astronauts on the Moon by 2020 and terminate development of the rockets and crew capsules needed to get there. Instead, he proposed to rely on commercial companies to carry astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station orbit and called on NASA to develop “game-changing” technologies to make travel to more distant destinations— the asteroids and eventually Mars— cheaper and faster. That made good sense to us as a way to focus NASA on truly venturesome projects while leaving more mundane chores to private companies.
The bill, which the president is expected to sign and NASA claims to be grateful for, cancels most of the expensive Constellation program that was developing rockets and capsules to establish a base on the Moon. But it orders NASA to develop and fly a new heavy-lift rocket by the end of 2016. The only way to make that deadline (and follow detailed instructions in a Senate report) is by using technologies from existing programs, hardly “game-changing.”
There is money for research on future space technologies, but far less than the president sought. The bill also authorizes an extra shuttle flight beyond those already planned, but fails to say where the $500 million to pay for the flight will come from, increasing the risk other NASA programs will be cannibalized.
A primary goal of those who drafted the legislation was to provide money and save jobs at existing NASA centers and their contractors. At a time of high unemployment, it’s hard to argue with that impulse. But the result will be to postpone, possibly for decades, the development of the new technologies that could revolutionize long-distance space travel.

Rico says it smacks of the Fifties, when we were dawdling and running behind, of all people, the Russians in the space race. (See, and hopefully buy, my father's book about a solution to that here.) Where's the next JFK gonna come from to reinvigorate the space program?