NASA has a new spacecraft. It’s bigger, stronger and safer than its aging predecessors, and… NASA has a new spacecraft. It’s bigger, stronger and safer than its aging predecessors, and it could get astronauts back to the moon by 2018.

The cost? A paltry $104 billion.

It’s a good thing the United States doesn’t have anything else to spend money on, or this might seem like a frivolous expense.

Currently, the United States’ deficit is hovering just below $8 trillion. The fighting in Iraq is not anywhere close to finished, not to mention the war on terror as a whole. Social Security is in shambles. The price of oil is rising while the supply dwindles, or, at best, remains the same.

Public universities are raising tuition every year, making higher education even more unreachable for children from underprivileged areas. There are families across the country that cannot properly feed, clothe and medically care for themselves, let alone even think about sending their children to college.

And then, of course, there’s that city that needs rebuilding down in Louisiana, and the hundreds of thousands of families who are going to need serious financial assistance to get back on their feet.

Now might not be the time to go gallivanting to the moon.

Overall, space exploration is a good thing. It allows us to test out new technologies, many of which have applications in day-to-day life. There are likely many useful things floating around in space, ripe for the discovering. More philosophically, mankind has long been inspired by the thought of going to infinity and beyond. Space exploration is the stuff that legacies are made of, the stuff that people seem to remember and celebrate more than they do a balanced budget or a more efficient welfare system.

The federal government has been spending money like a teenager armed with his first credit card. Perhaps if the current legislation had chosen to handle monetary matters differently, room could be found in the budget for another moon trip. This is sadly not the case.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s new craft could eventually be used in conjunction with the International Space Station and to assist in further exploration of Mars, so it is not necessarily a needless expense. Testing it first on the moon, which no human has set foot on since Apollo 17’s 1972 mission, is probably prudent.

Now, though, is not the time for this test. The moon isn’t going anywhere, and neither is Mars. Yes, President George W. Bush made a commitment to space exploration, but it is not the only one he has made.

Simply put, the government has overextended itself. Bush is not going to be able to keep all of his promises. Now, it’s important that he prioritize and work on keeping those promises that will benefit the greatest good. Conquering the last frontier must sound awfully tempting to our cowboy president, but now is not the time for an extra-terrestrial spending spree.