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Years ago I asked him WHY we never went back to the moon... He said that it was "political" ?????

He's right. We went to the Moon to beat the Russians. It wasn't about science at all.

Then Carl Sagan got on his "Search for Life" soapbox and Saganized NASA, and the agency faltered.

Now President Bush has initiated "Moon, Mars and Beyond" to create a space infastructure that will use the Moon's resourses to explode a space industry and get us into the solar system.

The Space Program and Space Science wasn't killed by Carl Sagan, but by Donald Slayton. Late seventies-- NASA engineers wanted exploration, which meant a focus (at least for a few years) on unmanned craft going farther, seeing more, and not coming back. Fearing a loss of status for pilots, and a dreamy emphasis on "space riding"--Slayton used his considerable celebrity emphasis to put unmanned exploration on the back burner.

Hence, the Space Shuttle and "Who gets to ride next? The Pakistani? The First Hispanic is space? The first Israeli?" going nowhere, doing nothing, costing trillions, lab experiments in low orbit that would embarrass a sophomore in a high school science fair.

The only good space science has happened "under the radar" at jpl, and has never rec'd the funding or attn it deserved, if space exploration was what we wanted. But we still got a lot of exploring and science for the little we spent there.

If the emphasis had been different in the late seventies...who knows? We might have made it to Mars (with human footprints) by now.

Now President Bush has initiated "Moon, Mars and Beyond" to create a space infastructure that will use the Moon's resourses to explode a space industry and get us into the solar system.

IMHO, this was political. Not a hope of accomplishing what you are advocating on the budget mentioned in that very same speech.