Quotes of the Day
Usually when a President starts to talk about the year 2020, it means he's going to deliver a dreary speech calling for the reform of entitlements like Medicare and Social Security, programs scheduled to go broke about then. But George W. Bush is trying to make the politics of the future fun again. He not only announced a new mission to the moon and Mars, but also sounded as if he would be doing it for the cost of a trip to the corner store.
A plan with so much vision done so cheaply was heralded as everything from election-year hokum to signature Bush policy — a bold stroke accompanied by incremental steps to measure results. The idea is that while the earthbound Democratic presidential candidates are having their down-in-the-dirt primary fight, arguing about the past, George Bush is charting a future course for the heavens. "We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own," said Bush.
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Bush and his political adviser Karl Rove, who helped craft the plan, believe in the power of big ideas. And they know that if the big idea is an optimistic one — and what is a trip to Mars if not optimism in action?--so much the better, especially in a campaign that will inevitably focus on the worrying topic of the war on terrorism. "This is not a school-uniforms President," says a campaign adviser, referring to a famous election-year policy of Bill Clinton's. "He thinks big. He leads."
Bush's critics say he's performing intergalactic hocus-pocus — getting credit for giant leaps but taking only tiny, insufficient steps. NASA projects that the full cost of the program would be close to $170 billion, but the President mentioned only $1 billion in new spending over the next five years. Bush is merely being prudent, say White House aides, who are focusing on the funding for the first stage of the plan. Rolling out a whole pot of new money is what doomed his father's effort to do a similar thing in 1989, when the $400 billion price tag ($600 billion in today's dollars) became a symbol of NASA bloat. Laying out only a few dollars now is also smart politics at a time of $500 billion deficits, when the President is facing conservative Republicans who are irritable over his big-spending ways and Democrats who are complaining that Bush's pie-in-the-sky proposals crowd out important domestic priorities. And Bush will not even be footing the bill himself. The real costs will occur long after he heads back to Crawford (even after a second term), forcing other Presidents to find the money. "We do not know where this journey will end," says a senior Republican staff member, parroting a line from the President's speech last Wednesday announcing the plan, "because we won't have the money to bring them [the astronauts] home."
Nobody in Congress will be eager to give Bush a postdated check for his mission to Mars without some tough scrutiny. For one thing, turf battles are sure to erupt. NASA is being asked to hack $11 billion off its current budget to free money for the new mission. Members will want to protect existing projects in their states or districts, not to mention NASA research on climate and astronomy that they believe is worthy. "Human beings in space isn't going to be the driver of our science policy," says Sherwood Boehlert (R., N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Science. He applauds Bush's plan but is already braced for a fight over potential cuts.
So far the country has had a mixed reaction to Bush's call for a national field trip. In electorally rich Texas and Florida, where NASA has its two most conspicuous facilities, locals no doubt love the prospect of new money and the renewed sense of purpose, a result that can only add luster to the Bush name in those citadels of the family dynasty. But the general public is not so amenable. According to a TIME/CNN poll, 61% of Americans oppose spending billions for the project. They think the money would be better spent at home. "So far out here, it's landed with a big thud," says a top Republican strategist in a key swing state. "People are saying 'Why can't we take care of our own first?'"
Though Bush's proposal gives a booster-size lift to NASA, his devotion to the space agency is a recent conversion. He showed no great fascination with the space program while he was Governor of Texas. He never visited the Johnson Space Center even though it was just around the corner, and saw the idea of space exploration through the prism of education, his signature "big idea" back then. But White House aides say that after the Columbia disaster, Bush became intent on reviving NASA, pushing for a concrete, results-oriented plan and dismissing an incremental option that focused merely on exploring the outer cosmos. "Set the marker," says an aide paraphrasing him. "Don't leave it to interpretation. Don't let people wonder. It's not the cosmos. We mean Mars."
The largest doubt about Bush's program is whether it will survive past his presidency. The hardest choices about funding manned exploration will come at the very same time those crumbling entitlements require more money too. When John Kennedy first put the nation on the path to the moon in 1961, he had the cold war as his backdrop. Each step closer to the Apollo landing was also a victory over the Soviets, a struggle that animated Kennedy's dream long after his presidency. The war on terrorism does not help Bush in the same way. Putting a man on Mars will not help find Osama bin Laden or his descendants. But future Presidents will fight that war too, and it just might be wise to accompany that battle with an optimistic mission to the heavens.
- John F. Dickerson