Juno's insertion into orbit around Jupiter on July 4th made the US proud of its space agency, and NASA's planetary exploration program has certainly had a nice run during the last year. New Horizons revealed Pluto, and now a spacecraft will soon deliver new insights about the Solar System's largest planet.

But the party is just about over. NASA, and more particularly the Obama administration, have failed to invest in future planetary science missions. Earlier this year, I had a chance to catch up with Casey Dreier, director of space policy for The Planetary Society, which as its name implies advocates for increased exploration of the Solar System. Although generally an ally to the science-minded Obama administration—the society's chief executive Bill Nye often hobnobs with the president—Dreier did not mince words about the The Planetary Society's views.

"I think with President Obama you have a legacy of a missed opportunity to really build on the foundation that he inherited, which was a fleet of spacecraft from Mercury going out to Pluto," Dreier told me. "He had an opportunity to build political bridges. There’s a very high level of bipartisan support for that, and a huge amount of public engagement."

All of the stunning successes of the planetary exploration program, from Curiosity landing on Mars to New Horizons visiting Pluto, were planned and largely executed before Obama became president. He could have furthered these programs by continuing robust funding for a Mars sample return mission in the 2020s (which now may not happen), more fully embracing a Europa mission that Congress has aggressively pushed, and supporting ambitious ideas such as a lander for Titan's methane lakes.

"Now the Obama legacy is, unfortunately, going to be that NASA’s presence in the Solar System is going to be diminished, particularly in the outer Solar System," Dreier said. "When Obama leaves office, every mission in the outer Solar System except for New Horizons will be ending in 2017. Juno, Cassini—those are done in 2017. Dawn ends, too. New Horizons is way out in the Kuiper belt. And that’s it. It’s the first time the United States hasn’t had a presence in the outer Solar System since 1972 when they launched Pioneer 10."

The White House view

Such a reality makes recent comments by John Holdren, Obama's science advisor, all the more galling. Speaking to Nature, Holdren was asked about concerns that NASA had lost its edge in spaceflight during the Obama administration.

"We knew when we came in that we had to rebalance NASA, and we had a committee chaired by Norm Augustine that looked at the space program and declared that Constellation was unexecutable," Holdren replied. "And that report informed what we did to scale Constellation way back. We still have an Orion multi-purpose space capsule. We still have the Space Launch System, a heavy-lift rocket, under development. But we scaled them back to the point that there was enough money to revitalize Earth observation, to revitalize planetary science, to revitalize robotic exploration, to think about new missions."

There are some fairly big whoppers in there, so let's unpack the response. It is absolutely true that the president convened the Augustine panel, and in the wake of the panel's report, tried to scale Constellation back. However, when Congress objected, the Obama administration folded. In the last full year before Obama took office, fiscal year 2008, the agency spent $3.3 billion on exploration, which included Constellation. In fiscal year 2016, the agency will spend $4.0 billion on similar programs. It is not clear how a 21 percent budget increase can be considered scaling back NASA's human exploration program.

Moreover, when Obama assumed office, Constellation's initial exploration aim was the Moon—an aim the Augustine report found to be "unsustainable." Now NASA's stated goal is to send humans to Mars—the so-called "Journey to Mars"—which is an order of magnitude more difficult both from an engineering and fiscal standpoint. In this sense, NASA's goals have become more unexecutable, not less.

But the planetary science comments contain the biggest exaggeration of all. Holdren claims the scaling back of Constellation allowed NASA to spend more on things like planetary science and robotic exploration. However, consider the president's budget request in 2013, which was made even as Obama was basking in the glow of Curiosity's landing on Mars. His proposal cut the budget for planetary science from $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2012 to $1.2 billion in FY 2013, and down further to $1.1 billion in FY 2014 and 2015. It is hard to see how these large cuts, which explicitly precluded flagship missions like Curiosity, "revitalized" planetary science.

Congress has increased funding for planetary science In the years since. This has included forcing the administration to start work on a daring mission to land on Europa and to begin developing an "ocean worlds" exploration program to similarly visit Enceladus, Titan, and other outer Solar System worlds with liquid oceans.

This is not to say that Congress has been a stalwart ally for NASA. Some members have larded the agency's budget with pork, especially where it comes to the Space Launch System rocket. In truth, neither Congress nor the president have been particularly effective stewards of NASA and its budget over the last eight years.

It is, of course, no surprise that politicians will play at spin and historical revisionism—but it's disappointing when scientists like Holdren do it. The Obama administration has a few successes to talk about with space policy, like its ardent support for SpaceX and other commercial companies that are lowering the cost of access to space. It should have just stuck to talking about that.