Apparently the Orion program is partially funded for the next year or two, so here's hoping congress gets a fire lit under them about it.  I'm all for global cooperation, but hitching a ride with the Russians is a bitter pill.

The cold war ended a while  back you know. And isn't NASA looking pretty seriously into more private companies to continue space exploration? That's the last I heard.

Constellation was the name of the combined program of exploration that included going back to the moon and no longer exists. Orion was the particular piece of hardware that would ferry astronauts to and from space and is still being developed. As a comparison:

Constellation = Apollo Program
Orion = Command/Service Module

I don't know what big companies like Boeing and Lockheed are doing, but NASA has already awarded a sizable contract to SpaceX and other new startups. It remains to be seen whether or not they can actually pull it off or not, but it'll be at least five years before they're up and running. Until then, it's Russians all the way.

We're AMERICA, god dammit.  It is our manifest destiny to be laughing at the rest of the planet from the farthest reaches of space.  When precisely did people stop caring about that?

http://www.theonion.com/articles/ussr-w … rog,21007/

It's official. 
<returns to wistfully flicking NASA mission patches into the fireplace>