[extropy-chat] Moon news

[BillK]

This is all about politics. Science has nothing to do with it.
Nov 2004 is Bush re-election time.

<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3919608/>

Lofty space vision runs into realities
Lawmakers and aides say ‘return to moon’ talk
is more about politics than about spaceflight

A senior Senate Republican aide said the plan gives Bush a 'big bold
idea' to run on for re-election. But would the Republican-led Congress
fund it?

'Unlikely,' the aide said, asking not to be identified by name. 'But the
president doesn’t have to get this through Congress this year. He just
needs to put it on the table as part of the agenda for his second term'.

'The president is now looking for centrist supporters who may be
enthralled by big ideas. This has much less to do about legislative
reality on Capitol Hill this year than it has to do with political
reality in 2004,' he said.

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The USA spends about $15.5 billion on NASA, including about $3.5 billion
on the shuttle program. NASA has a huge money pit in the Shuttle support
and infrastructure, but unfortunately people have started to realize
that it is all pretty pointless and has now started killing astronauts
as well.

NASA's problem is that they want to get rid of the shuttles but keep all
the billions of funding.
How to do this?  Geee - I know! Let's go back 30 years and start
building big rockets and capsules again.
Nahhh - the public would never stand for that.
OK. How about if we pretend we're going to Mars - like in Buck Rogers?
That should get people excited. And we can say we've got to keep up with
the evil Chinese as well.
You know, that might just work.
And the beauty of it is that we don't need to find any really big bucks
until after Bush's second term. So we don't need to get huge budgets
through Congress and we don't have to worry about the budget deficits
before 2008 when Bush will be retiring to his ranch.
Then it's all someone else's problem.
Cool!

It's all politics.


BillK