Here:

^The so-called conservative opposition to this new direction in space policy seems, at least to me, to come from three motivations: a visceral and intrinsic (and understandable) distaste for any policy that emanates from this White House; a nostalgia for the good old days, when we had a goal and a date and a really big rocket and an unlimited budget (what I've described as the "Apollo cargo cult"); and, in the case of such politicians as Senators Shelby, Hutchison, Hatch, et al., pure rent seeking for their states. Of course, these aren't mutually exclusive: For some, all three apply. But none of these reasons addresses the problems with the status quo or the wisdom of the new policy.^

^Equally ironic is the embrace by modern conservatives of Jack Kennedy, whose supposed vision about space is a myth. Yes, like Barack Obama's speeches, his Rice speech was inspiring - sort of, if you didn’t think very hard about it. Is something worth doing just because it's hard? Really? As I noted a few years ago:^

^"It would be hard to move Pikes Peak from Colorado to Florida. It would be even harder to build a life-size replica of the World Trade Center with used q-tips. Those things would also serve to 'organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.' That doesn't make them worth doing."^

^But Kennedy was trying to inspire and to win a Cold War. In reality, he wasn't that into space, as he told his NASA administrator, Jim Webb, a couple of months before his assassination. Had he lived, the program might even have been cancelled, depending on how things were going in Vietnam.^

^The reality is that Obama's new space policy is more conservative than George W. Bush's was, as I noted two-and-a-half months ago when the new budget was first released. Don’t take my word for it - ask Newt Gingrich or Bob Walker, or Dana Rohrabacher, conservatives who follow space policy closely and aren't swept up in nostalgia for a Space Age that never really was, at least not in terms of making human spaceflight affordable or sustainable. The opposition from so many Republicans and conservatives to this new policy, which analysts and space activists have been seeking for years, is both frustrating and mystifying.^

^As a former staffer for both Gingrich and Rohrabacher said at a recent space conference, "Democrats don't think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don't think it works above it."^