Tuesday this week, in a speech before the National Space Council, Vice President Pence announced that the US would land its astronauts on the Moon again within five years.  He said:

“And I’m here, on the President’s behalf, to tell the men and women of the Marshall Space Flight Center and the American people that, at the direction of the President of the United States, it is the stated policy of this administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the Moon within the next five years.

And let me be clear: The first woman and the next man on the Moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil.”

This strikes me as a big deal.  The Trump Administration has been consistently vigorous in pushing American space programs both government and private.

The three major networks all carried a space story on the evening news–but not the commitment by the US to return to the moon in five years.  No, edging out that story was the cancellation by NASA of the first “all women” spacewalk because they discovered that one of the spacesuits they had on the space station did not fit the astronaut.  Now, admittedly, this raises some concerns about NASA mission planning.

But what is it about this space story that makes it a headline while the announcement of the commitment to return to the moon is not?