Au contraire. Just scatter around the components of the project into various Congressional districts. Build large facilities in places with political horsepow

Au contraire. Just scatter around the components of the project into various Congressional districts. Build large facilities in places with political horsepower and name them after important people. Gemini/Apollo is fraught with this. Personally, I doubt that the science community would be behind manned space travel in any case. It's more marketed to the engineering and military world. I wouldn't doubt that internal NASA competition over limited dollars shows astronomers and planet scientists smothering the manned efforts in it's crib now and again.