As you might expect, I have been spending a fair amount of time gauging the reactions to the end of the NASA Constellation program. As such, I thought it would be interesting to apply the Kubler-Ross psychological model for the five stages of grief to the categorical nature of the responses I’ve been hearing/seeing:

Denial
“How could the U.S. want to abandon thier pursuit of human spaceflight for the forseeable future?”
“It still hasn’t made it through Congress, there is going to be a big fight!”
“The representatives/NASA administrator/senators/contractors are going to lash out, defend Constellation and we will be right back on track again!”
“Don’t give up! Fight this! Write letters!”

Anger
“Another program cancelled!?”
“When is the last time we built anything?!”
“All you Ares haters out there, congratulations, you got the plug pulled on the entire works!”

Bargaining
“We may have lost the moon, but we’ve gained the solar system!”
“Well, Orion wasn’t going to be ready until 2017 anyway, the commercial sector is going to get us back into space faster!”
“This will be better in the long run, Constellation was unsustainable anyway.”

Depression
“How are we supposed to keep working, when we know it’s cancelled?”
“All that work… down the drain… I just… can’t concentrate on the task at hand now…”
“We were so tantalizing close to going back to the moon, and now what… circle the Earth over and over again… I’m just going to quit and go work in another industry.”

Acceptance
“Well, the powers that be have spoken, let’s go forward with this new direction.”
“We have what we learned, no one can take that away, let’s use that to our advantage in the future.”