Now that President Bush has vowed that Americans will return to the moon and set their sights on Mars, you can bet the question of space exploration is going to become a political issue. The Democrats have already started complaining about the costs of going to Mars at a time when taxes are, in their estimation, already too low. They are going to be explaining that the money for the moon mission would be better spent at home. And they’re going to start to cavil that there’s no practical point to it all.

One way to pre-empt this would be for the president to vow not only to go to the moon but to claim the Earth-orbiting rock as American property and to assert that it’s needed for military or commercial purposes. If the moon can serve as a base from which to send man to Mars, after all, it ought to be able to serve as a base from which to point high-octane military weapons back at our enemies here on Earth. Or at least as a base from which to set up listening posts and the like that would be out of reach of enemy attack once our enemies start targeting the satellites we have in Earth orbit.

It’s hard to predict which demarche on Mr. Bush’s part might trigger a greater uproar among the Democrats — the idea of using the moon as a military base or the idea of using it for commercial purposes, such as mining for high-grade ore, say, or manufacturing medicines in the pure environment of an airless factory so lifeless that not even germs skulk there. One possibility is that if Mr. Bush were to declare a commercial motive to America’s mission to the moon, he could win support among the Democrats if he abjured the profits or at least promised that America would not sell the Moon, for as the poet once said:

Oh, ‘twould be a grievous loss
And one beyond repair
Were the Moon to be dismantled
For a shilling here and there.