Imagine that you're watching a commercial on television. It's one of those touchy-feely public service messages, something about equal opportunity. So there's some sort of teacher, talking to little kids at school. "What do you want to do when you grow up?" she asks. The best answer is, "I wanna be an astronaut!"

Americans have an overactive fascination with outer space. Ask yourself what was more important in the 1960s, Kennedy's assassination or Neil Armstrong's "giant leap"?

It's a difficult question. For years, the space race garnered attention because of its novelty and its political implications. But now, as we send more money than ever to NASA and its surrogates, it's time to cut back.

Our country needs money now more than ever. That's why we cut the Strategic Defense Initiative, and that's why we should cut some of the tens of billions of dollars allocated to the space program.

Space is permanent. Waiting a few years to explore it will not change what we find there. Cutting ongoing research programs could have negative long-term effects on the space program, but balancing the budget is more pressing than exploring the surface of Venus.

The debate about the space program recently entered the domestic political spotlight.

Members of Congress found themselves forced to choose between billion-dollar programs: the Texas atomic super-collider and the still unbuilt space station. The space station won out, not because it carried with it a huge wave of new jobs. The uncontrollable irresistibility of space exploration won the day.

The space race used to be of tremendous political importance--Sputnik and Apollo 11 sent shockwaves through the whole world in 1957 and 1969. Now, however, the former Soviet Union cannot afford to pursue the space race.

Like the arms race, the space race has dissolved because of Russia's monetary dependence and willingness to cooperate with the West.

What competition there is comes from space symposia in Europe, Canada and Japan. In case the federal government hasn't noticed, these people are our friends.

Cooperation with scientists from other nations would allow the U.S. space program to continue at its current pace while cutting our own budget a bit.

Even if the pace of space research is slowed somewhat, who will be hurt? Some would argue that we need to find other celestial bodies to populate when our own Earth becomes unhabitable. It's probably safe to hold off on those particular plans for a few years yet.

Others fear giant comets careening into our planet while we're not looking. The chances of that are slim enough, but predictions of such events can be made from earth. Moreover, there's not much anyone could do about it once warned.

The chronic spending on space does not end with NASA. Another billion-dollar program is SETI--the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. No personal pork-barrelling by a backwoods congressional representative could ever have been as superfluous and ridiculous as this program.

To spend a billion dollars sending radio waves into outer space, in the hope that someone, somewhere in this universe of trillions of planets, has also invented a radio apparatus is completely ludicrous.