NASA private space cuts don’t leave a lot of room for error

Yikes:

“NASA’s big-ticket missions have been spared the Congressional ax. The Orion crew vehicle gets $1.2 billion, the Space Launch System (SLS) gets $1.9 billion. Together, these are supposed to get humans to Mars or an asteroid, or both.

But there’s some who are not quite so happy: the private space companies vying to get astronauts to orbit by 2017, including Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada. The White House request for $821 million to support the commercial crew program was trimmed to $6...