Nope Eta Vero is speaking verily. The Bush administration don't understand space, especially seeing as Dubya hasn't been there and can't even conceive of such a place. Like the rest of the universe. It don' look like Texas, none.

Ergo, rather than upset his conservative supporters by openly canning the space programme, he's effectively put it on hold by "parking" the major programmes and talking about scaling back or canning the current main thrusts.

"Nasa," he is saying, "UP YOURS!" And this will be especially poignant if the US loses what few shreds of collective sanity it still possesses and re-elects the plonker!

The problem for me, as a space nutter, is that I tend to agree with the administration's apparent assessment of Nasa as a bunch of time-servers and captives of the manufacturers. But I don't want to see the space programme canned, or even cut back.