"[NASA] had a better relationship to the Republican Party; President Bush pushed very hard for the Freedom space station, and while Clinton has made some remarks in that direction, he has never pursued it intensively under his administration," remarked Jensen. "Goldin has had his back against the wall, and had difficulty in getting funds for a planned Mars mission and Freedom space station."

NASA Administrator Dan Goldin continues to promote programs such as the Lunar Prospector and Stardust missions despite severe funding cuts from the US Congress. The 1996 NASA annual budget was US$14 billion, which fell to US$13.8 billion in 1997, and was projected to fall to US$11.6 billion in 1999, in contrast with the original SEI estimates of an annual US$25-40 billion. Having already cut 25,000 jobs, with another 30,000 targeted, Goldin hopes that his relentless push for small robotic probes will force NASA centers to fast-track organizational restructuring and increase program efficiency. His master-work is the Origins program which will study planets within 100 light years of Earth to understand how the universe formed and whether life is unique to our planet. Goldin hopes that Origins, which has virtually no budget, will become as well known as the Apollo and space shuttle projects, re-igniting public interest and countering the Clinton White House budget cuts.

But as the 1996 elections attested, NASA and space exploration are not key issues in US politics. If anything, the Democrats are devoting less money to space research. Despite strong support from competing presidential candidates Pat Buchanan and Alan Keyes, who both stressed the need for halting bureaucratic expansion whilst increasing future manned missions, former Senator Robert Dole (R-Ark.) didn't make the future of NASA and space commercialization a major issue during his unsuccessful 1996 presidential campaign.

Newt Gingrich also called for a "major government focus to help reduce the cost of payload lift," and has encouraged the adoption of a prize system to encourage private sector firms to finance cheap launch systems. Entrepreneur Dr Peter Diamandis founded the X PRIZE Foundation in 1993 for this purpose, attracting widespread support from commercial space advocates. Diamandis has drawn an analogy to the Orteig Prize awarded to Charles Lindbergh for the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris.

Both politicians and space commercialization advocates agree that the major priority is the continued funding of single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) and reusable launch vehicle (RLV) programs, dominated by the Rockwell International and Lockheed Martin aerospace firms. "One of the goals of the NSS is to lower the costs of getting a payload into orbit, and enable new opportunities to open up, allowing others to innovate," believes Thorne. "There is certainly a place for both government and industry. But in the long run, industry has to pick up where the government leaves off, and has to turn R&D into real profit dollars that are going to benefit the citizen in the street." Industry funding of organizations such as the moonbase oriented Artemis Project show that the resurgance in space commercialization has been prompted by a budget restricted government that Thorne suggests "is promoting the private sector to pick up the tab on the new generation of RLVs, space development, and satellite launches. These can be a profitable business. Certainly the insurance business turns a healthy profit in insuring launches." When NASA launched a satellite for major firms like RCA, it invoiced them whether or not the launch was a success and left the insurance companies to replace the lost satellite. Post-1998 liability changes, however, have significantly altered the profitability situation.

The X-33 and X-34 RLV programs may have received priority funding, but Lawrence Barr Crowell of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) steering group has a more long-range outlook. "There is a lure to the idea of warp drives and non-rocket propulsion. Having worked on space mission planning I must confess I see a dim future for manned space flight. The shuttle is becoming aged and the only plausible replacement is the Delta Clipper being tested at Alamogordo. With the current launch vehicle technology the International Space Station is outrageously expensive. Given the fickle voting of the public and the equally fickle nature of Congress, I give a 50 per cent chance that about half of this will be deployed in space before Congress axes it. That is if a shuttle catastrophe doesn't occur. I have seen several Atlas-Centaur, Delta rocket, and two shuttle launches. They are impressive, but it's very inefficient.

"Nuclear propulsion, at least nuclear powered launch vehicles, are probably out of the question. A combination Challenger-plus-Chernobyl disaster would kill all hopes. I would not want to be the program manager of the system after such a disaster!

"Warp drives have some degree of physical validity to them, if the energy conditions imposed by Hawking and Penrose are violated and cosmic censorship is not a sufficient condition in general relativity. Only time will tell."

Despite funding cutbacks, BPP co-founder Al Holt continues to spearhead research into new launch system paradigms. "A reduction or biasing of the effects of gravitational fields would be a logical and perhaps easier first step, but we are looking for 'warp drive' approaches also in parallel. The BPP steering group is interested in funding both sub-light and faster-than-light research paths. A breakthrough development in 'warp drive' physics should also have some application to sub-light propulsion and transport."