Obama gets spacey: "Barack Obama called Sunday for astronauts to be sent to the moon by 2020 and then possibly to Mars, once again reversing his earlier stance in favor of scaling back the space program," Beth Reinhard writes in the Miami Herald. "Obama wants to add at least one additional shuttle mission after NASA's planned May 2010 conclusion of the program. And he wants to get us back to the moon by 2020," Tom Abrahams reports for ABC's Houston affiliate, KTRK-TV. "This is a marked change from Obama's late 2007 position in which he called for massive cuts to NASA and a longer moon timetable."
Writes Richard S. Dunham, in the Houston Chronicle: "Obama has not always been a strong supporter of additional money for NASA. Indeed, in December 2007, his campaign Web site declared that he would finance an early childhood education initiative by reducing funding for the Constellation program. And Obama told the Houston Chronicle's editorial board in February that he was not convinced that human exploration was worth the cost."