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Protesters greet me in Cocoa.
Suzanne Kosmas is a Floridian politician elcted to the US House of Representatives. I wondered how many people notice the similarity of her name to the "Kosmos" series of Russian satellites.

At 3 pm I arrived at the Cocoa Expo (a baseball stadium) to find family groups waving protest placards. After parking I walked back to the road, photographed some of them, and then gratefully accepted a ride on a "club car" from the rapidly filling car park to the stadium entrance.

Helium-3 is an essential isotope in the hydrogen to helium fusion process that powers the Sun. Some say the Moon may have vast amounts of helium-3 embedded in the soil from the solar wind which, if mined and brought back to Earth, could make possible fusion power reactors that could give virtually unlimited supplies of energy. These protesters see Obama's space policies as leaving the tapping of that resource to China, which many Americans regard as a potential, if not outright, enemy or competitor.

At the time of this rally the Space Shuttle was scheduled to cease operations by the end of 2010. That would leave Russia's Soyuz and China's Shenzhou spacecraft as the only manned spaceflight systems in operation. Already the US has bought Soyuz flights to access space, an action that angers some Americans.

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