Is there any stopping Amazon's ascension? With NASA out, will OpenStack get liftoff? Have your say below. Photo: NASA Goddard Photo and Video/Flickr

First NASA said it was grounding its work on OpenStack, the open source cloud rival to Amazon it co-founded. And now it seems the space agency is all-in on Amazon, with NASAs CIO recently touting (and Amazon echoing) that using Amazon Web Services could save the agency $1 million a year.

And if breakups were not already hard enough, reports note that OpenStack was not even mentioned when NASA was talking up its new cloud partner. Gotyes Somebody That I Used to Know might sum up how most are reporting it:

But you didnt have to cut me off Make out like it never happened and that we were nothing And I dont even need your love But you treat me like a stranger and that feels so rough

However, when NASA said it would no longer be working with OpenStack, it was also getting a lot of big IT-attention. As Cloudline reported at the time: OpenStack has come into its own, IBMs Dr. Angel Luis Diazwrote for us in April. So with Dell, IBM, Cisco, HP, Yahoo, Rackspace, and Red Hat on board, the time has come to scale back involvement, NASA says.Karen Petraska, from NASAs CIO office, said the agency is not interested in competing with commercial cloud companies, and would rather be a smart consumer of commercial cloud services,reports Web Host Industry News.

As Wired Enterprise reports this week, all that private sector love had a little help from NASA folks. NASA co-founded the project with Rackspace in 2009, and many of the key contributors have left the space agency for the private sector. Chris Kemp, a former chief technology officer at NASA, left to foundNebula, an outfit that offers hardware devices for building Openstack clouds. Joshua McKenty foundedPiston Cloud Computing, which seeks to bring a version of OpenStack to traditional businesses. And several other members of the team that built NASAs OpenStack code now work for Rackspace.

Have your say: If a space agency can get what it needs from Amazons cloud, is OpenStack going to have a hard time getting off the ground?

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With NASA on Amazon, Will OpenStack Get Liftoff?