As indicated by the clip from the political web site: spacepolitics
"Big labor takes a swipe at space exploration
The AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions that represents 13 million workers, has unveiled a new web site, America's Priorities, that criticizes President Bush's proposed space exploration plan. The centerpiece of the site is a 30-second commercial that starts with a question: "What should America's priorities be?" The spot then splices sound bites from Bush's January 14 speech unveiling the plan with people on the street saying things like "jobs", "health care", and "help kids go to college." Only one of these people seems critical of the proposal specifically: "A hundred billion dollars to send a man to Mars?" asks one woman. (At least she didn't say it would cost a trillion dollars…) It then concludes with a woman saying, "His priorities are in the wrong place."

There's very little else on this site dealing with space policy, so it's unclear whether the AFL-CIO is opposed to the proposed space initiative in particular, or space exploration in general. I'll hopefully have some more details about this in the next few days."

It appears to me that this is counter productive to any thing that the associations can do.

I see from the side bar on the Marsnews site that space adventures has brokered another batch of seats on the soyuz. They still have one flight left out of the last ones. At 20 million or so it may be a rough ride but if I had it I would do it.

Asteroid Eaters: Robots to Hunt Space Rocks, Protect Earth from space.com

Can anyone say mining operations.

A must read article on the space ref site
Former Astronaut Don Peterson's Ideas for Future Human Flight Programs
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=953

Many of the items we have discussed and blogged in on over the past few months are contained in this write up.

I have to disagree with Don in his take of the Moon being a stepping stone Mars. He assume everything will be shipped to the Moon from Earth. To be useful they would have to use the materials on the Moon to manufacture and launch the majority of the equipment to Mars to be useful, which I would think is what Bush's plan calls for.

I would agree that construction from available resources is a must in order to make the costs of doing the vision less. Shipping everything to the moon and then to assemble is not a good idea it requires more fuel to be made to make up for landing of these items on the moons surface in the first place.

Also assembling in LEO any rocket going to mars may actually save fuel if it is a modular build.