"Think of it," he said, "as Apollo on steroids."

Hardly a heavenly image.

To be on steroids, in this context, means to seek a shortcut to stardom that may provide a few moments of glory but that, in the end, leaves you either banned from the field or a burned-out hulk, wondering if it was all worth it.

And that's just what NASA stands to become if it really believes we can return to the moon by 2018 simply by spending $104 billion siphoned from its other line items.

Not that the planners at NASA haven't had their thinking caps on. They know that the American people aren't going to pop for the staggeringly expensive development of entirely new materials, systems and capabilities on a scale that our Cold War-driven nation undertook with its first moon program.

So they made the logical decision to recycle Apollo and space shuttle technology. All that stuff has been conceptually restacked into vehicles that abandon the currently unrealistic pretense of being Luke Skywalker's zippy X-wing and return to John Glenn's dull-but-reliable Spam-in-a-can.

It would probably work, and it is great that Utah's ATK Thiokol would remain a key part of the space program, refining and manufacturing more of its time-tested solid-fuel rocket boosters.

But it is highly doubtful that the whole program can really be accomplished for so little money. And it is highly questionable whether a nation already plunging ever deeper into debt for its wars, its natural disasters and, worst of all, its tax cuts can afford even that little.

It is particularly worrisome that, in order to fund this flash in the pan, NASA would almost certainly have to cannibalize its highly efficient and successful robot probes and orbital telescopes, projects that don't enthrall the politicians as much but are infinitely more useful to science.

NASA and the Bush administration need to make a better case for this mission, its value to science and humanity, than they have done so far. If it is all for national propaganda, or has a rational national security motivation, they should say so, and let us decide if that is what we really want to do.

Otherwise, it's a heck of a lot of money to go less boldly where we have been before.