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WHEN President Bush announced his moon and Mars initiative back in January, astronomers started getting nervous. Science programmes have a way of getting swallowed up by presidentially ordained redirections of the space programme – for example, scientists complained about reduced spending on planetary exploration in the early years of the International Space Station project. Bush’s plans to send human beings beyond Earth orbit for the first time in decades, to establish a base on the moon, and put astronauts on Mars are far more ambitious than the ISS, so there were immediate fears about what worthy projects might get slashed…