About Obama & Co. not really caring about space exploration,

I'm going to steal a chunk of Tam's post; it covers things nicely:
It's a good thing NASA didn't exist from the nation's founding, or Lewis & Clark's canoe would have taken thirty years to build and contained strips of birch bark from 72 different Congressional districts. If we want to see progress in space, we need to tell NASA to go research airfoil shapes and just declare everything that happens above X miles to be extraterritorial and tax-free.

They’re worried about funding the ISS? Auction it off. You don’t think that people will pay big bucks to go gambling in a casino with zero-g hookers and blow? It'll be the only way to get regular folks into space, too, because they're not going to pay astronauts to mix Long Island iced teas in those weird drinking squeeze bulbs.

What NASA and the government overall have done is try to make it as difficult as possible for private enterprise to do the job; there's an awful lot of people in government- including NASA- who'd rather see the ISS de-orbit and crash than have some nasty private company run it. And most of the European governments would rather see an asteroid hit the planet without warning than have private enterprise running space missions(even if they'd spot and deflect the asteroid).