Wall-E or Major Tom? Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s proposed cuts to NASA tilt in the wrong direction, preserving too much funding for a manned space program of questionable value even while slashing the agency’s more cost-effective robotic programs. In its budget unveiled this week, the administration proposed slicing $300 million from NASA’s planetary science budget, a cut that would force the agency to pull out of unmanned Mars missions planned for 2016 and 2018.