The exploitation of nuclear reactors is far far from “business as usual” when it comes to spaceflight. Business as usual is being stuck in LEO. Sending men to Mars is not business as usual.

Is kert sugessting that manned deep space exploration can be done without nuclear power? Does kert have some magic technology up his sleeve? Is kert suggesting that NASA should not do space exploration because any government involvement in space is bad? Does it even occur to kert that if NASA focuses on deep space exploration, it is more likely to leave the LEO arena open to greater commercial exploitation? That the new NASA plan is more likely to open up space to private development?

Kerry and his supporters must be persusded otherwise, or at least enough other Democrats must be persuaded to support space nuclear power.

20 years of one-party rule in the White House, House and Senate is very unlikely, however desirable some may believe that to be.

Kerry has called for a worldwide ban on nuclear fuel enrichment as part of his policy for anti-nuclear weapons proliferation. But that is a backdoor method for killing all high energy uses of nuclear power including peaceful ones.

Without fuel enrichment you have to shut down existing nuclear power reactors. And you can forget about NASA’s Project Prometheus to develop nuclear power for spaceflight power and propulsion technologies. Kiss the JIMO nuclear powered mission to Jupiter goodbye and a whole new generation of deep space unmanned probes. And kiss goodbye any manned deep space exploration missions. Without nuclear power manned space exploration is impossibly expensive.

CEV deployment and shuttle retirement are the key events and neither reach a “point of no return” until well after January 2009.

If President Bush called for standing down the orbiter today – – it never flies again – – then I could agree that the 2004 election had great relevance for the future of America’s space program.