When asked about the current administration and where NASA is at today, Cunningham is equally as scathing. He claims that "Obama doesn't have any interest in it [space] at all, but politicians have to go along with something." It was Obama who, in 2010, cancelled the Constellation program to take humans back to the Moon by 2020. Cunningham argues that the young people of today have to be more daring if humans are going to once more stretch the frontiers and continue manned deep space exploration. "In our day it was something we felt was worth doing, to go out and push the frontier. Today is a risk-averse society, young people don't wanna take chances doing anything. We thought that was part of living, it was part of how you improve, it was part of how you move society forward."
This risk avoidance, he says, is a far cry from the days of President Kennedy. "He challenged to do the impossible and we made it work. And we would have done anything and as a matter of fact people died to make it work. Today even within NASA it's almost a cult of avoiding risk in any way."
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