Wonder if they will plant a US flag or the UN flag?

If he's going to import moonbats to the moon I shall become a moonbat, posthaste!

Establishing Americans in Iraq, the once cradle of civilization: over $80 Billion

Establishing Americans on a lifeless inhospitable rock orbiting the Earth: probably a lot more

Creating a huge deficit to get Bush re-elected: priceless

please, i'm clever, not bitter ;)

Kathy, I'm with you. Where do I sign up? :)

I like Earth; what with its air, water, and stuff...

It's it like -250C on the dark side of the moon? Yeah right! I'm cold enough at home, thank you very much.

Land on the moon? Heh. Typical. Doesn't have a plan for getting back from there either.

Who'd want to come back, what with Bushiter and his warmongering hawks on the eve of WWIII for Oil!!

Oh there'll be plenty of oil, alright: 65 million years after humans go extinct! (Which is 66 million years from now, using my nifty H. Dean Calculator!)

Let's do it. And on to Mars. And beyond... That's what we were made for.

Ara: ouch! But cute. :)

Me, I'm amazed that anyone thinks the Feds can do jack shit in space.

Face it, for 20 years now, NASA has been one giant jobs program. The Shuttle is the world's biggest, most expensive X-plane.

All NASA can think of is "Shuttle II," after they killed one of the best initiatives in years: the DC-X.

If the "spaceplane" contest is successful, perhaps something similar could be tried for a moon-transit vehicle?

Casey, right on about the DC-X. I didn't think anybody paid attention to that. My salute to you, buddy.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb

Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt. I've got an idea...why doesn't Bush try and help the economy or work on a national healthcare plan? Oh, I forgot, that would require him to actually help the common citizens in this country. Screw that, let's go to Mars instead. What a joke! Mars isn't going anywhere anytime soon, let's let future generations tackle that one. If there is even ONE unfunded school in this country, we shouldn't be going anywhere outside of this planet's orbit.

Some really disappointing comments on in this thread, let me tell 'ya.

Mars isn't going anywhere any time soon, but neither was the new world. I don't see why all that money was spent on colonizing the new world when there were problems in England, France and Spain as well as the threat from the Mohammedeans.

If there's even ONE underfunded school. If that's our metric for doing something, you condemned us to this rock until the sun grows cold. All that an administrator has to do is simply requisition one more stapler, and we put a stop order on all further progress? Right now there 6 billion in the bank account from last year that wasn't spent simply because it wasn't requested.

Third, the NASA budget ran to about 15 bn last year. Care to match that up with education, defence, farm subsidies, the strategic helium reserve, et al? Please.

And as far as those who are reflexively (not all comments are, but ther are some folks out there who fall into that category) anti-NASA forget one big, big factor. They've got the cash and don't have to deliver ROI or increase share-holder value. That's what got us to the moon the first time around, so don't reflexively underestimate it's importance.

Arnold: thanks. I'm glad to know someone else heard of it..:) (actually, Dean knows too, heh)

Tim: thank you for providing the stereotypical kneejerk-liberal objection. :) In order:
-Bush helped the economy already. He left it the fuck alone.
-National Health Insurance isn't the panacea you think it is. The Feds can't even deliver the mail cost-effectively, much less the Shuttle (just to keep on topic {g})!
-More school funding? Look at the numbers. Every year Federal funding increases, and scores decrease. If that wasn't hint enough, there is no correlation between funding and performance. Two cases should suffice: The Washington D.C. system has one of the highest per pupil spending rates in the country, with one of the worst school system. You can say the same thing for Ohio here in Cincinnati, which also has a highly-funded system with terrible overall performance.
Repeat after me: funding is not the problem...

But you are correct that Mars should not be the next objective. That should be the moon.