Subtext: “We choose NOT to go to the moon.”

Commiting the country to talk about ambitious but vague space objectives.

When he gave his speech on space, what was Obama thinking? I don’t know, but here’s a guess.

“Nearly 50 years ago, President Kennedy committed the United States to an ambitious program. He set our country, which at that time had only 15 minutes of manned spaceflight experience, on a course to put a man on the moon. He set a deadline of less than nine years to achieve this.”

“Our adversaries in the Soviet Union had a significant lead. They had launched the first satellite, and the first man in space. And they would continue to exceed our space achievements for many years.”

“Still, the President and the country stuck to the challenge, and met it.”

“I will not repeat that course. I will not make a firm commitment, and I will set only vague goals. We will research manned flight, without actually building and operating space vehicles. We will expect private industry to take care of that.”

“We, of course, expect private industry to succeed because government isn’t capable of great things. I say this even though the government developed the atomic bomb, realized JFK’s space objectives, and created the internet. No, as we all  know, only private industry is competent.”

“But we will spend $3 billion on a heavy lift rocket for deep space exploration. We will do this without any idea of where we would go with such a vehicle, or how we  would get there. We won’t even consciously evaluate whether a single huge booster is the best way to get there—wherever ‘there’ is.”

“We choose NOT to go to the moon. We choose not to go to the moon, but instead to talk about sending people to an asteroid and Mars. We take this course because it is cheaper, yet it allows us to get excited about some imaginary future achievements.”

“I am happy to say, that I will long be retired before the dreams I am outlining fail to materialize. But, hey, both presidents Bush promised the moon and failed to deliver, too.”