Stimulate this, Obama!

Above is the Ares V, the planned super-heavy rocket for the US moon mission and, with the exception of the Soviet UR-700 (cancelled due to hydrazine being extremely nasty, seemingly), the heaviest rocket ever seriously worked on. 188 tonnes to LEO; that's about half a space station.

The Augustine Commission is due to deliver a report stating that, effectively, the current NASA moon mission is financially impossible. A lot of money has already been poured into this programme already, but NASA's budget is not what it once was and the development of the Ares I, the smaller rocket intended to do the manned transport, has not been what you would call successful so far.

The thing is, this is a worthy project. It could lead to a permanent base on the moon, and a potential Mars mission. It's a sort of super-Apollo; bigger landers, designed to stay for months, with the potential to ship a base separately. At worst, it should produce some commercially useful technology; these things generally do. At best, it could open the Moon and Mars to humanity.

Now, the US is currently pouring billions and billions of dollars into infrastructure projects under the stimulus plans. These are useful projects, no doubt about it, but might it not make sense to build a few fewer roads, and instead put the money saved towards finishing this amazing project on time, for 2020?

I've no idea how the American people would react to such an idea. I suspect, by and large, not terribly favourably. It's a strange world where no-one bats an eyelid at the many billions spent on developing fighter jets and AEGIS missile cruisers for use against those highly imaginary enemies of the US who presumably have such things of their own, but would have a fit if a fraction of that was spent opening up the moon.