As Curmudgeons Corner notes, Gene Cernan, the last man on the moon, is happy to write about the program "that will finally deprive him of that dubious honor":

With a single announcement from NASA last week, the nation took a giant leap forward in realizing its plans to return humans to the Moon by 2020 and then press on to Mars and destinations beyond — known in space policy circles as the Vision for Space Exploration.

The announcement proclaimed that Lockheed Martin will build the replacement for the space shuttle, a cone-shaped crew exploration vehicle designed to take astronauts into and out of Earth orbit, as a prelude to voyaging once again to the moon.

NASA has dubbed the new spacecraft project Orion, following in the tradition of projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo of the 1960s and 1970s. Orion will borrow the best from our country's nearly 50 years of space experience and combine it with 21st century technology for this new and challenging venture.

The result is expected to be a new vehicle that is more robust than Apollo, less expensive to operate than the space shuttle and safer to fly than any other capsule or winged space plane flown so far. First flight of Orion with a crew on board is targeted for 2014, but NASA hopes to find a way to move that up to as early as 2012.