Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent the last four years to design, build and test spacecraft in the program dubbed Constellation, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

The program, however, has not caught the public's imagination as did, say, the Apollo program, and with a new president to be elected late this year, some question whether the program needs to be revamped, the Post reported.

A Feb. 12-13 conference at Stanford University is to debate the issue, said Louis Friedman, head of the Planetary Society and an early advocate of much of the Bush space plan.

"Some of us have real doubts about whether the money will be available for the Bush plan," Friedman told the Post.

For an interesting series of opinion and analysis by resident space cynic Jeff Bell please read the following articles. They are listed in the original publishing order and start one year later when President Bush made a speech about space in the post-Columbia period.

You can ring the Bell on Jeff's highly critical assessments of the post station era and how we got there in our discussion forums on www.SpaceBlogger.com

+ Shuttle-Derived Vehicle: Shuttle-Derived Disaster (16 April 2004)

+ The VSE Booster Switch (21 May 2006)

+ Scrap The Stick Now! (11 August 2006)

+ The Griffin Space Fantasy (01 May 2007)

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