To the moon?

The Associated Press is reporting that President Bush is likely to announce plans next week for returning to the moon, establishing a "permanent presence" there and an eventual manned trip to Mars.

You know, I'm a big sci-fi fan, and I absolutely love the concept of manned space exploration. My earliest memory is of my mother taking me outside the night Neil Armstrong took mankind's first steps on the moon and pointing up to it so I'd know where he was (I was 4 at the time, so watching it on TV wasn't making much of an impression.) Hell, I've been to Star Trek conventions and still have my homemade uniform. So you'd think this kind of an announcement would be something I'd find absolutely thrilling.

Well, it's not. It's not that I don't want us to achieve things like a permanent presence on the moon or travel to Mars, it's just that I think we should make fixing a few things here on Earth first a higher priority.

The deficit facing the children and grandchildren of this generation are horrific - and most likely, they'll start feeling the pinch of those deficits right about the time their moms and dads start retiring - and the Social Security payments they've been counting on to help cushion their own investments (many of which lost considerable value when the 'dot com' bubble burst or as a result of one of the many scandals such as Enron, in which the wealthy perpetrators made off with millions and the employee-victims found their retirement investments to suddenly be worthless) through their retirement years could very well dry up by then.

Bush's tax cuts - which were designed to primarily benefit the already-wealthy - don't do anything to help make it easier for the average citizen to save up for their own retirement, and if the Republicans get their way and privatize Social Security, the plan itself will become meaningless, since it will be subject to the same whims of the economy that individual retirement savings are. I know some recently retired people who have discovered first hand how devastating it can be to have your retirement savings suddenly lose a significant portion of their value when the economy goes sour, and had they not had the cushion of Social Security, I don't know if they'd still be able to live in their own homes.

Theoretically, a program like new moon landings, a permanent base and trips to Mars could help provide new jobs (something this nation desperately needs as the current "jobless recovery" isn't helping too many of the working-class people who need help the most), but I'm not sure if it can provide enough new jobs to justify a price-tag that would likely be in the trillions.

The other issue to consider, of course, is the matter of whether Bush and his administration are even competent enough to be able to pull such a plan off. As badly as they've mismanaged the war in Iraq (listening only to people who agreed with their own pre-conceived notions of how the war could be waged on the cheap and firing those who warned that it wouldn't work, only considering "intelligence" that backed their theories and desires instead of intelligence that actually represented the real situation and so on), if I were an astronaut-wannabe, I'd be scared as hell to climb into any kind of a space vehicle designed and built under plans developed by this administration's appointees.

If (Gods forbid) President Bush gets re-elected, and if (in spite of my doubts) his economic plan leads to us actually having a budget surplus again, and if his administration starts demonstrating some kind of competence in carrying out their plans, I would likely support his desire for America to start exploring space again. Until then, though, as much as I would personally love to see it happen, I think it has to wait. The "Baby Boomer" generation - which makes up a sizable chunk of the population - is starting to retire now, and we've yet to see the full impact of Bush's ill-advised tax cuts. I just don't see any way in which such exploratory plans make any sense now.