To Aries!

President Bush, who is obviously and completely NOT campaigning for re-election, is planning on sending men to Mars and establishing a permanent moon-base. How can you not love this guy? Talk about skillfully manipulating the news cycle. The man's at 61 percent approval, the Dow is back to where it was when he took office, and does he sit back and let the Dems chew into him? Of course not. He waves the Space card in front of everybody's eyes, and let's the populace go "Oooooooh shiny...." Meanwhile, Kerry says Dean is a trucklehead, and Dean says Clark kicks puppies. Beautiful.


I'd be annoyed if I thought that Bush was using space only as a campaign ploy. But I don't think he is. I think after the Columbia went boom over Texas that some serious consideration went down at NASA, and now politics and science are converging. Granted, Bush the Elder proposed this back in 1989, and it went nowhere, but that had a lot to do with the timing of the election cycle and the lack of a "space race" with the Russians, who weren't capable of racing anything back in 1989. Success will depend on how much money we decide to spend, but it sounds like fun to me.


Naturally, questions abound: the article states that "Observatories also could be built on the moon, and mining camps could be set up to gather helium-3 for conversion into fuel for use back on Earth." How would that work? How would it be sent back to earth? How is it affected by the 1979 Moon Treaty? Is the moonbase going to bypass or make use of the International Space Station? Still it's one of the few useful things government does, and it's good politics for the President.