A Man on the Moon, the book which inspired HBO's miniseries From the Earth to the Moon
When President Barack Obama’s administration announced in early 2010 that it was canceling Project Constellation, the next manned-spaceflight program which was supposed to take American astronauts back to the Moon and – eventually – on to Mars, I couldn’t help but think that John F. Kennedy – to whom Obama had often been compared during the 2008 Presidential race – would be extremely disappointed with America’s lack of determination and “can-do” spirit as far as space exploration is concerned. Though Obama is a Democratic President as was the late JFK, he and his advisers are – depending on one’s point of view – pragmatic realists who are dealing with two wars overseas, the Great Recession, the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a lack of bipartisan support in Washington, or bleeding heart liberals who are willing to tax and spend billions of taxpayer dollars on a wrong-headed mission to create a “socialist” welfare state along the lines of those in Western Europe and Scandina...