Space is fun. It's got big adventure written all over it, with fast machines, exotic locations and heroic participants. One doesn't have to understand or value science as a discipline to get a kick out of it.

Science is hard. It requires disciplined thinking in rooms with blackboards, in buildings with big machines and lots of equations, in observatories where one watches the sky alone all night with an assortment of instruments, in labs with setups nowhere near as colorful as the Mad Scientist's in that Bugs Bunny cartoon.

To someone with a fundamentalist's outlook, science looks like a cult and space looks like a crusade. Can the former really be necessary to the latter? Naaaaah.