Being a liberal Democrat who strongly believes that future of humanity in general (and more particularly the future of that subset of humanity we call Western Civilization) depends on our settling space I am personally persuaded as to “Why space?”

Bob Zubrin + Samuel Huntington, as it were.

That said, I confess I cannot yet articulate a succinct, catchy, persuasive rationale for “Why” – – and yet that is exactly what we need.

And yes, I have real doubts about whether George W Bush actually meant what he said January 15th or whether he is willing to share the vision and the credit. On this I sincerely hope to be proven wrong but the jury remains out, IMHO.

An active and energetic space program is not only good in and of itself, but helps provide solutions to so many other problems. But the national zeitgeist considers space exploration, at best, a fun distraction- like buying a DVD player when one needs to focus on the rent.

John Kerry needs to be confronted with this obvious truth at every town hall meeting over the next several months.

If you accept the claim that oil is a reason why we invaded Iraq, then national security is the trump card for the coalition (environmentalists, unions) advocating the Apollo energy program. Of course, it used to be the trump card for the supporters of the original Apollo program. It’s a pity that space is seen more like a detached scientific program these days.

Now if only China could get its act together and beat us (back) to the moon…

But Kerry’s statement does unfortunately seem to put the two in opposition. Why is it space always seems to be in opposition to every other worthy project? Oh well…

Kerry was surely talking about the “Apollo Project for Energy Independence”, which I think he and Gephardt have been supporting for a while; Dean was also a supporter. It’s an interesting concept – of course I happen to be a believer that space is our best hope for energy independence – I’ve been writing about that in various other places…

Anyway, see http://www.apolloalliance.org/
for more info on the “Apollo Alliance” which is behind this – they published an analysis of what they thought it would take earlier this year.

Smartly they’ve focused on the fact that spending a lot of money means creating a lot of jobs, which gets them great union backing. Now why can’t space folks do that?