As any good space cadet knows, this money provides the first installment on the president's plans to return humans to the Moon and then go onward to Mars. Space cadets like this writer should have been popping champagne corks and feasting their eyes on old Star Trek reruns in celebration.

Yet, the response to the passage of the new NASA budget seems to have been muted, even unenthusiastic. Why?

Is it because in space nobody can hear you cheer?

Or is it because the more sober space cadets realize that even with next year's down payment on the president's space initiative, any plan to put astronauts back on the Moon and eventually on the plains of Mars has to run a decades-long gauntlet of fickle congresses and presidential administrations?

Maybe the supporters of manned spaceflight in the United States doubt the ability of the president's Moon/Mars initiative to survive in a time of mammoth budget deficits.

After all, whenever politicians in Washington need a token budget cut one of the first places they run to is NASA. And with the resignation of NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe only more doubt can be cast on the political survival of President Bush's space plans.

Maybe American space cadets just don't trust NASA anymore, which is not too surprising, given the fact that the space agency has blown two space shuttles, killed fourteen astronauts, and squandered billions of dollars on failed programs like the X-33 and X-34, which were supposed to at least start us on the road to a shuttle replacement.

Or is it that deep in our techno hearts we space cadets realize that there is no real reason to get excited about our newly reelected president's space exploration vision? And that the Bush space "vision" may have been burdened with a very large pair of blinders.

It should be remembered that one of the reasons Bush Sr. lost to Bill Clinton in 1992 was due to his inability to comprehend the "vision thing."

For lack of imagination is one of the main characteristics of President Bush's plan to carry Americans back to the Moon and beyond. Nowhere in the plans announced so far is there any mention of a serious effort to bring down the cost of getting to LEO by any useful amount.

Oh, the newer launch vehicles that will be used to support the Moon/Mars initiative, such as the Atlas V and Delta IV, will reduce costs at the margin through somewhat simplified design and reduced production costs, but they're certainly not going to force down the cost of boosting to LEO below the figure $1,000 per lb. figure NASA used to quote during the days of the now defunct X-33 and X-34 programs.

Even Ebon Musk and his Falcon X rocket aren't going to approach those numbers. Recently, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said that by 2020 the cost of just the Moon portion alone of the Bush space plan is likely to hit the $100 billion mark. And with NASA, as we all know, that could very well turn out to be on the cheap end of the spending curve.

The Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) isn't anything to write home about either. It will no doubt be a substantial improvement over the USA's aging flotilla of space shuttles, especially with regards to safety, and the current modular approach to its construction will probably enable it to fulfill its triple roll as a manned LEO transport (maybe even to one of Robert Bigelow's inflatable space stations if the ISS is ever decommissioned), a lunar exploration vehicle, and if the final stage of President Bush's space initiative is ever realized, the ship that finally puts humans down on the surface of Mars.

But when NASA officialdom talks about CEV, major reductions in operating costs when compared to the space shuttle doesn't seem to the part of the package it likes to emphasize.

Partial reusability is mentioned, but never as a prime selling point. One gets the feeling that the whole program was designed with the clunky, maddeningly slow, pre-Silicon Valley work habits of the two major aerospace companies, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in mind.

And Governor Jeb Bush of Florida was certainly on the mind of his brother George when the plans for the Moon/Mars initiative were being crafted in the White House.

It takes seven thousand people to get a shuttle off the pad and into orbit, and the way the Moon/Mars plan seems to be structured at present it is most definitely not going to cull those numbers any time soon.

I have the depressing feeling that we space cadets are going to be forced to stare at TV shots of the serried ranks of the mission controllers at Cape Canaveral and Houston for a very long time to come.

The Bush-Cheney concept of a space program could one day conceivably get us if not to Mars, at least back to the Moon-where it is likely to stall out in just the same way the Space Shuttle did, leaving future generations of space cadets to complain how boring the sight of the full Earth has become. We may wind up farther out in space, but we'll be endlessly orbiting the same world we have since 1961.

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