Maybe it’s just because I’ve always been a wanna-be space boy, but I’m (sort of) with Mr. Aldrin on this:

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Aldrin revealed that he intends to lobby Barack Obama and John McCain, the two US presidential candidates, in an effort to ensure they find sufficient funds for Nasa’s goal to establish a permanent base on the Moon and then send a manned mission to Mars.

Nasa celebrates its 50th anniversary this year but faces grave embarrassment. The ill-fated Shuttle is due to make its last flight in 2010 but it will be a further five years before its replacement, the Ares rocket and Orion crew capsule - also intended for trips to the moon - are ready.

In that time American astronauts will have to hitch lifts on Russian Soyuz flights merely to visit the International Space Station.

Mr Aldrin, 78, said: “To me it’s abysmal that it has come to this: after 50 years of Nasa, and after putting about $100 billion into the space station, we can’t get our own astronauts to our space station without relying on the Russians.”

He said his message to the next president is this: “Retain the vision for space exploration. If we turn our backs on the vision again, we’re going to have to live in a secondary position in human space flight for the rest of the century.”

The budding libertarian in me questions whether government should have the strong role here - they tend to over complicate and slow things down. But privatization of space travel, if encouraged, may well yield even more impressive results.

The thought, however, of abandoning space exploration because of well, whatever the reason, seems foolish to me. Forget about E.T.s and all that - space holds untold resources that can be used here at home, and its very nature - eternal, vast, mysterious - inspires us to go beyond ourselves and achieve greater things.

Add to that the fact that the Ruskies and the Chinese are devoting a lot of resources to the final frontier, and we have a military reason as well - and that’s something our government should be getting behind.

Besides…I fully intend to take a commercial space flight some time in my life, so they need to get to work on getting the costs down.

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