Neil Armstrong on the offensive-- too little too late?

I have to admit I am a bit shocked that the typically silent Neil Armstrong is so vocal about President Obama's space policy. A little late to open his mouth, in my opinion. Nevertheless, I am also in a bit of a quandary as to whether he and his like-minded former Apollo comrades are right... or backward-looking:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/neilarmstrongobamasnewspaceplanpoorlyadvised

While I want to applaud Obama for throwing the gauntlet down regarding a greater role for commercial space in LEO and perhaps beyond, the reality of the situation is that.... we have no launch vehicles flying yet... or likely in the very near future! And I don't know about anyone else, but does it bother you that we may be hitching rides to the ISS on a very expensive Soyuz (though, admittedly, it probably is a bargain, relatively speaking.)

The question becomes, philosophically, who's right? Is anyone right? Does anyone care? Should we care?

Obama's plans for NASA-- shades of military procurement disasters?

The Space Review has a provacative article this week which compares the Obama "space plan" to the disasters which have befallen the military in the past with their miscellaneous schema for procurement, project oversight etc:

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1619/1

The horror stories contained within remind me strikingly of the similar idiotic procurement nightmares I deal with daily in the pharmaceutical industry. No surprises there; I'm surrounded!

Thoughts on the legitimacy of this comparision/prediction with the Obama plan?

Enabling safe passage to NEOs

On April 15, 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama, in a speech at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, proclaimed that "By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space. We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history."

A manned mission to a near-earth asteroid is a bold endeavor, and proponents believe that it may represent a more viable deep space target for exploration than a return to the moon. However, the capabilities for sustaining a crew for such a mission are many-fold more complex than caring for astronauts in low earth orbit, which is the bulk of our recent experience with spaceflight.

What issues and hurdles are likely for astronauts to be successfully launched-- and returned!-- from a near-earth asteroid mission? How is crew selection, training and the need for enabling technologies going to evolve to make this all possible? How does a near-earth asteroid mission prepare astronauts for an eventual sojourn to Mars, which President Obama hopes to also see in his lifetime?