The Americanization of the universe?

House majority leader Tom DeLay, who ram-rodded congressional redistricting in Texas in 2003 to favor (who else?) Republicans, appears to want to redistrict the universe as an American preserve. And so, it seems, does NASA’s new administrator.

According to a CNN story, earlier this week, on a tour of Johnson Space Center with DeLay, NASA chief Michael Griffin said:

If you ask anyone in this country, ‘Do you believe that the United States should cede the moon to say the Chinese, Europeans, Russians, whoever?’ I bet you the answer would be, ‘No.’ “

DeLay backed that reading of NASA’s mission — defined by Griffin as a belief that a majority of people

want to make sure that as humankind expands into space the United States is there in the forefront.

So how do we pay for it? DeLay had no specifics but noted that war and federal budget pressures should be no barrier. He said:

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