Thinking about the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, what can one say but

The current debate in Britain over whether the government should support "manned space flight" will unfortunately not likely result in benefits for the public…because the terms being used hide the most important issue.

The DVD "Gaia Selene: ...saving the Earth by colonising the Moon" by Screenwriter and Producer Charles Proser makes an unanswerable case that investing in developing space-faring capabilities such as large-scale solar energy and wireless power transmission, helium 3 collection and utilisation, and the use of other non-terrestrial resources including near-Earth asteroids and comets would pay a good return in the longer run.

For advocates of space tourism, the year 2004 can be conveniently summed up in one word: "SpaceShipOne". That project could hardly have gone better: after just three powered test-flights, starting on the centenary of the Wright brothers' first flight, SpaceShipOne reached space three times in 2004, thereby winning the Ansari X-Prize of $10 million.

The publishers’ blurb says it well:

By Dr. Patrick Collins

President Bush has chosen Sean O'Keefe to be the next Nasa administrator; he’s expected to start formally early in the new year after the final Senate ratification. O’Keefe is currently Deputy Director of the US government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Earlier in 2001 he was responsible for denying Nasa the extra $5 billion that it requested (on top of a long series of earlier budget over-runs) toward the International Space Station ( ISS). A professional public sector manager, O’Keefe has said of the project “...technical excellence at any cost is not an acceptable approach....”

Maxwell Hunter, one of the America's most experienced rocket designers, died on November 10 at the age of 79, joining the sadly long list of people who should have been able to visit space for themselves.

Now that the previously suppressed Nasa report "General Public Space Travel and Tourism" is available on the Nasa web site, it bears looking at. Go to www.nasa.gov and type the words 'space tourism' into the search box. You may get more than you were expecting.

Nasa was recently ranked the 4th worst-managed US government organisation by the Senate Government Affairs Committee. It was particularly criticised for the incompetence it showed in: