CHRISTIAN COALITION: TO MARS!

As you may have heard, the first bit of major fallout from Dubya's new let's-make-me-look-visionary space program is the death of the Hubble Telescope.

There will be no more servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA has announced, leaving one of the agency's most spectacularly successful projects to die a slow death.

The decision, announced late on Friday, is the first serious fallout from President George W Bush's new plan for the US space program. One part of this is to scrap the space shuttle fleet in 2010.

When I heard about this, cynic that I am, my first thought was "how does the Bush right wing gain from the end of the Hubble?" After all, as Shakespeare wrote, "this effect defective comes by cause".

And then it hit me. The Hubble Space Telescope allowed humans to see further into the universe than ever before. We've even seen newly-created stars, the ever-distant effects of the post-Big-Bang expansion of the universe. And gee whiz, why wouldn't Christian conservatives want us to see, in action, how the universe was formed?

That's why the Pat Robertson types will eat up the Mars plan. The closer to Earth we aim the resources of our space program, the further away the proof that the world is, alas, older than six thousand years.