To Infinity - and Beyond! - George W. Bush is channeling JFK. The Post reports that Bush intends to announce - in what advisors hope will be a "Kennedy moment" - a bold new mission for NASA: to send Americans to Mars (with a stop at the moon along the way). What is he trying to achieve, some 43 years after the original call to land on the moon, and 32 years after we last visited the place? Take your pick from the following suggested rationales: (a) provide for a huge government jobs program, (b) get NASA out of its post-Columbia funk, and/or (c) unify the country behind a "gigantic common purpose."

The NYT has the political history leading up to next week's speech. We've been here before. W's dad, 41, thought he'd take advantage of the "peace dividend" following the end of the Cold War to reconfigure the military-industrial complex into a engine for human space exploration. Not quite, huh? That 1989 plan ran aground on a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $400 billion. (That used to be considered a lot of money - now it's just a Bush Jr. tax cut.) I'm curious how the son is going to get around the same problem, but maybe those borrow-and-spend Republicans just don't worry about such things any more.

In general, I am in favor of this proposal. Space is cool. In fact, there was a time when a politician's forward-looking views on space exploration was at least as important to me as any other platform plank. But I'm now a bit wiser in the ways of the world, and I can even acknowledge that a visionary space program is no panacea for the world's ills. Nevertheless, the optimist in me hopes that the future will bring enough economic success and progress on other fronts that we don't need to rule out grand projects like this one.

(Note: as details leak out, even the space exploration lobby isn't uniformly behind W's plan.)