“Already NASA’s schedule to return to the moon is badly slipping. Instead of having a permanent lunar base by 2020, NASA will be lucky to even have landed a crewed spacecraft on the moon by then. It took just eight years from Kennedy’s first ambitious announcement to get to the moon. Apparently, it will take double that amount of time to do it again. The Apollo moon landings have often been compared to the explorations of Christopher Columbus and the Lewis and Clark expedition to Oregon. For example, on the 20th anniversary of the first moon landing, President George H.W. Bush declared, ‘From the voyages of Columbus to the Oregon Trail to the journey to the Moon itself: history proves that we have never lost by pressing the limits of our frontiers.’ But what boosters of the moon expeditions overlook is that the motive for pressing the limits of our frontiers in those cases was chiefly profit.” (07/14/09)