Rumour has it that George W. Bush is going to make some announcement in the next wee while about starting manned space programs to the moon and Mars. Not that there’s any coherent plan for either of those things, nor any likelihood of the US Congress being willing to pay for them. But for some reason it is newsworthy that he might maybe be about to announce it.
Just like his father did. That didn’t work out so well either.
It’d be nice to think that the USA was prepared to do more in space than footle around in archaic space shuttles and pour buckets of cash into a useless junkheap of a space station from which all the potentially useful components were stripped before construction began. They do make fine unmanned space probes, but not nearly enough of them.