ONE way to win friends and influence people in the White House, if you’re a Middle Eastern dictator anyway, is to deliver some good old weapons of mass destruction. As everyone knows, they’re damned hard to find these days. So Muammar Gaddafi, once numbered among the princes of the axis of evil, is now in the pink with George Bush and his pals at the Pentagon and in the State Department.
All he had to do was send the US some uranium, centrifuge parts for enriching more uranium, some missile parts and 25,000 kilograms of documents on how to make high-tech weapons. It led Bush to say that Libya’s actions open the door to the possibility of better relations between the US and Libya. In diplo-speak, that’s pretty nice stroking for the man who admitted his hirelings had killed a planeload of passengers and people on the ground at Lockerbie, in Scotland.
Now that David Kay, the former head of the US team seeking WMDs in Iraq, has just about closed the door on finding any there, Gaddafi’s goods might be the only ones Bush will get out of the Middle East… that is, unless Saddam Hussein suddenly fesses up. But word has it that Iraqi jurists have their own agenda for him, and finding out about WMDs is not top of their list
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LET’S say you want to establish a base on the moon, send a fleet of robotic spacecraft to explore the planets, and then send humans to Mars, but you don’t want to spend any new money on your space programme. It sounds impossible? Not for the US. At least not according to the new budget the Bush administration is proposing for NASA.
Until January this year, President Bush hasn’t had much to say about America’s space programme. But last summer, something sparked his interest and suddenly, the nation needed a new space agenda. In January, the Bush administration described the goal of returning to the moon and exploring the solar system and beyond. But the president has been under a lot of pressure lately to curb domestic spending, what with a war in Iraq, a war on terrorism and tax cuts to pay for. So ambitious plans are fine – they just can’t cost very much.
Officials say they can accomplish their goals by phasing out the international space station and the space shuttle, and cancelling an expensive space launch initiative – although it’s not clear exactly how astronauts are to get into space without the shuttle. When President Reagan first proposed a space station, it was supposed to cost about $8 billion but by the time the dust settles it will have cost nearly $100 billion.
Americans may yet return to the moon and then head off to Mars, but it will cost somebody a lot of money. In space, there are no bargains.
