It will determine the whole direction that the future space program of the United States is going to take, and so that's something that we'll be looking at very closely."
VOA: standard.2009.12.24
In fact, stock-market turmoil appears to have driven some investors to the modified DIY space from the other direction.
Long-period comets can arrive from any direction in space and are believed to originate in the Oort cloud (a reservoir of comets encircling the sun, the existence of which was worked out at the same time as the Kuiper belt by Jan Oort, a Dutch astronomer).