With predictions of doom to planetary science programs in the air, NASA's FY 2013 budget didn't disappoint. The agency said it would not be going forward with current European Mars probe launches in 2016 and 2018. At $17.7 billion and expected to stay flat for the next five years with no adjustments for inflation, the real pain has only just begun.

"Despite a constrained fiscal environment, this budget continues to aggressively implement the Space Exploration program agreed to by the President and a bipartisan majority in Congress, laying the foundation for remarkable discoveries here on Earth as well as in deep space," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

Plenty of Obama Administration code phrases were included in Bolden's opening statement and repeated during the conference, including “new jobs," "helping to support an economy that is built to last," "new ways of doing business," and "tough choices."

One of those tough choices was cancellation of the planned 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions -- precursors to a Mars sample return -- with the European Space Agency. Instead, there's going to be a joint working group and an "integrated strategy" with science and human exploration goals which may take advantage of a 2018/2020 exploration launch window to and coordinated with "our international partners."

As expected, the over-budget and off-schedule James Webb Space Telescope received a funding increase of$627.6 million -- more than a $100 million increase over last year. There was and will continue to be a lot of probing and grumbling within the planetary science community since money is being cut out of its programs in order to fund the completion of the Webb Space Telescope. NASA says it will try to conduct medium-class missions to meet the research goals set by various advisory bodies.

Commercial manned spacecraft development, "Commercial Crew," is slated for $830 million per year over five years -- a slight decrease from the $850 million per year over five years requested in FY 2012. Congress only allocated $406 million in FY 2012, an action that means NASA may have to buy seats on Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2017 to get astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

Failure by Congress to fund Commercial Crew is looking to be a very bad move. The Russians have lost two Soyuz rocket since August 2011 and inadvertently destroyed a Soyuz space capsule on the ground during testing.  This time around, NASA is positioning full funding of Commercial Crew as "insourcing" to "create jobs and decrease reliance on foreign launch providers."