I do not mean political simply in the sense of a dearth of the kind of political leadership Kennedy showed. Consider that Presidents Reagan and Bush both attempted Kennedy-style space projects, yet Reagan's space station is more than a decade late, and Bush's grandiose, $450 billion Space Exploration Initiative died fast and quiet. Consider further that a very feasible Mars mission costing 1/10 that gargantuan sum has been waiting in the wings for years (see Robert Zubrin's book The Case for Mars) to no avail. Clearly there is another element at work, here.
It's an element that is difficult to pin down. On the one hand, we face an insidious bias against free-enterprise approaches to space, in the media and elsewhere. http://www.twincities.com/mld/twincities... Sir Martin Rees, prominent British astronomer, is an advocate of private space ventures, including the exploration of Mars. In the linked article, however, this quote is taken out of context, to great effect: "If they were governmental or international (expeditions), Antarctic-style restraint might be feasible. On the other hand, if the explorers were privately funded adventurers of free-enterprise, even anarchic disposition, the Wild West model would be more likely to prevail." The full text of Sir Martin's remarks are available at the bottom of this page, so you can judge for yourself; but it seems pretty clear to me that the writer who quoted him did so in a highly unrepresentative fashion, twisting his remarks into a weapon for use against those of us who do not believe that only governments can be trusted not to botch things. The "mainstream" view, of course, is usually bolstered by unhistorical and prejudicial notions of what the "Wild West" was like, but is unfortunately the dominant one.
On the other hand, we have the perenially unfocused efforts of NASA to come up with a grand scheme for the conquest of the solar system. There was the "Pioneering the Space Frontier" report in the 1980's, which went nowhere. Then came Bush's Space Exploration Initiative, which went even further into nowhere. And currently a cleverly-named NASA Exploration Team (NExT) is convened to prepare yet another blueprint of more of the same, due out in mid-October. http://www.space.com/news/beyond_iss_020... We may not do much space exploration, but I anticipate that before this decade is out, we will have all of Nowhere mapped with a resolution of one meter or better.
