UNSTEADY STATE.(The Talk of the Town)(State of the Union address)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 02-FEB-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

George W. Bush says he wants to go to Mars--a motion that many of his fellow-citizens would heartily second--but he probably doesn't mean it. The speech in which he announced his "New Vision for Space Exploration" was exceedingly vague about how and when the trip was to be made. It did say that in 2015 or maybe in 2020 Americans would be going back to the moon, where they would build a base for "human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond." An official likened this speech to President Kennedy's address of May 25, 1961, in which he asked the nation to "commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

A week later came Bush's State of the Union address, the text of which one scans in vain for any mention of Mars, the moon, or space exploration. The subject has already been dropped. (By contrast, Kennedy's 1962 State of the Union reiterated and discussed the lunar excursion he had proposed eight...

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