This is why cash prizes for advances that decrease the cost of space travel is the only thing a politician can do that has any chance of gaining my respect. It's action, not speech, and within a fixed time frame either tangible progress will be made or not.

Twenty billion dollars to develop and demonstrate a reusable mass-driver system for deployment unmanned cargo to orbit? In the big scheme of things it's a drop in the bucket. But it would make a ton of other things much, much cheaper.

The only problem is that it doesn't sound as sexy as a "vision" of space exploration decades from now.