LEX America’s budget deficits are headed to the moon so Americans, it seems, are not. In what counts as a step towards austerity, the $3,800bn budget Barack Obama unveiled on Monday would eliminate a new lunar exploration programme initiated by the last administration in order to tame a record $1,600bn deficit.
Sending men into space was always more about burnishing America’s reputation than getting the most celestial bang for the buck, particularly during the cold war. Being not only the first but still the only country to send men to the moon more than made up for the Soviet Union’s first-mover advantage with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. But just as the notion of a space race with a now-collapsed superpower seems quaint, so is the idea that the US can afford such extravagances. Re-deploying these sums could finance several commercially and scientifically useful space programmes, probably with spare change left over. More than 40 years after Neil Armstrong’s historic step, the US no longer has the burning need to prove itself nor the financial wherewithal to write a cheque for $200bn, the cost in today’s money of the Apollo programme.
