As a friend of mine said, "Bush is all bark and no bite" and todays announcement of the return to the Moon and sending Man to Mars is clearly yet another example of this. What you have is a big announcement about going to the Moon and Mars, with almost no execution and less committed funding than he promised for hydrogen power research. Basically Mars is just a pipe dream that there is no commitment or even planned date for. Returning to the Moon is ten year goal - longer than it took Kennedy and NASA to put man (little 'm' intentional) on Moon thirty-five years ago.
But wait, there's actually only $1 billion in new funding from the government because the other $11 billion will come from other NASA projects over the next five years. Quite a lot of that will no doubt come from scraping the space shuttle fleet which has proven very costly to run, and replacing it with a simple man launching rocket system to get people to the space station. To be honest the later makes sense - the shuttle always has been a ridiculously complicated and expensive launch system that was mysteriously selected over all other superior, cheaper and safer launch technologies in development at the time. Well it wasn't that mysterious because the alternatives weren't being made by the big defence contractors at the time.
So, basically what Bush has announced is $1 billion extra NASA spending over the next five years - just over 1% extra per year so in real terms an effective freezing in all NASA spending. Plus he's announced a scrapping of the space shuttle, and a replacement of it with a return to the Moon goal that will easily be canceled without too many tears. Even if it happens probably wont be appreciated by anyone but the hardcare space exploration fans, after all most people have already seen what it looks like on the Moon. For them its a been there, seen it, done it thing that probably happened before they were even born. Without batting an eyelid they can tell you on the Moon its cold, dark, grey and basically boring. Even from a scientific point of view there isn't much else to do on the Moon until you actually build a base there.
Finally, does anyone remember that China just announced that its going full steam ahead with its space programme including a mission to the Moon and beyond. The fact that China has never formally acknowledged that the USA has actually landed on the Moon is just icing on the cake. Its quite clear to me that GWB is really just afraid that in the next five years China will steal Americas thunder and put Chinese Man on the Moon with high resolution multimedia coverage to boot and Uncle Sam will be caught out sleeping under a Red Moon. For $1 billion, less than he spends in Iraq in a week he can hedge his bets with another big bark and no bite.
When Americans do get back to the Moon I'm sorry to say it wont be Mankind that is making the giant leap, or sequel to the giant leap. It will be Corporate Mankind that will because really, the only reason to go back to the Moon any more is to make money. After that it only remains to be seen how long it will be before the USA decides to shred The Moon Treaty and declare open season on terra-lunar for commercial exploitation and Coke, Disney and Time Warner are all lining for commercial naming rights to the big ball-o-cheese formerly known as "The Moon".
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