To Infinity and Beyond!
Not content with buying the Mexican vote for November's election, George has decided to woo the Great American Public by going after a completely different kind of alien. Some time next week, he's expected to go S Club on us, reaching for the stars with the promise of making the moon the 51st state, to be swiftly followed by putting men on Mars.

(Talking of Mars, my theory on why Beagle 2 has gone missing is that Martians are big Damien Hirst fans. Think about it. Aliens are alleged to mutilate cattle in the US Midwest - just like Hirst - and Beagle used one of the artist's multi-coloured dot pictures to calibrate its instruments after landing. When the little green men saw that a genuine Hirst had dropped into their back garden, they quickly ripped it out of the Martian lander and opened Tate Mars. Makes sense to me.)

Unfortunately for America and the world, this has got to be a big vote winner. I mean, I hate the guy, but promise me the moon and I'll vote for you (as Tony Blair will attest).

It also neatly ties in with the Project for the New American Century's stated aim to develop a US military Space Corps. Not content with policing this world, George wants to stamp his authority on the cosmos before it gets out of hand.

Or maybe he's just getting his own private off-world retreat ready for the day when he and his energy pals finally screw our planet beyond all redemption.

Of course, if you fancy making a buck when Nasa builds its moon space station, I recommend investing in lunar real estate before it really takes off. There are over nine billion acres of land on the moon, most of them still available for sale, but if you own the plot that the starship troopers want to build on, they'll be sure to pay top dollar.

Don't get me wrong, I think space exploration is incredibly exciting, and it's been neglected for far too long. There's far more out there than we can ever hope to know about, so the sooner we start chipping away at it the better.

So despite the fact his daddy failed in his attempt to do something similar, Bush Lightyear's big ambition is something that really catches my imagination.

But then there's also so much we don't know about the Earth's oceans. And there's so much more on which the vast amounts of money the project will need would be better spent: a cure for Aids and cancer, writing off Third World debt, educating the 20% or so of the US population who struggle to read or write at a functional level, developing renewable and environmental sources of energy, feeding the millions still starving to death in Africa, rebuilding Iraq properly... feel free to weigh in with ideas of your own.

This evening someone at work rubbished the whole idea of space exploration, saying she had no time for fantasy or the unreal - a world view that I find incredibly sad. After all, what hope is there when people give up on their imagination?

This needn't be science fiction, it can be science fact.

I want to go to infinity and beyond. I want to find the truth that's out there. I want the moon on a stick.

I just don't want to sell the Earth in order to get it.