We were thrilled to read about the recent visit to Corvallis by Air Force Brig. Gen. Susan Helms, a former astronaut and Portland native.

Helms came to speak to a class of students at Oregon State University, urging them to follow their dreams of becoming an astronaut. She should know: Helms has logged 211 days in space during her career, including 163 days on the International Space Station. She holds the world record for the longest space walk, just four minutes under nine hours.

Helms is a wonderful role model for students, especially female students. And as she told the story of how she almost took herself out of the running to be an astronaut, her message came through loud and clear: Don't underestimate yourself.

Helms is no longer with NASA; she left the space agency in 2002 to return to the Air Force. But her appearance at OSU reminded us of a longstanding gripe we have with NASA: Its willingness to spend billions and billions of our dollars on a project to put a manned base on the moon - a project that is unlikely to come anywhere close to paying back our investment.

As writer Gregg Easterbrook reports in a persuasive article in the June issue of The Atlantic, the moon-base idea got its genesis when President Bush stated his desire to launch a manned mission to Mars. But such a mission still is too technically difficult and too expensive.

So in 2004, Bush launched a compromise, the manned moon base. NASA likes it because the project is astronaut-intensive. Congress likes it because it has the potential to ladle plenty of federal pork on certain congressional districts.

The problem, as Easterbrook explains, is that such a plan sucks money away from an effort that could have a much better return on our investment: Identifying asteroids and comets - space rocks - that could strike the Earth and figuring out ways to change the courses of those objects.

This used to be the stuff of science fiction, movies such as "Armageddon" or "Deep Impact." But recent research suggests that collisions between Earth and space rocks happen much more frequently than previously thought. One expert Easterbrook quotes thinks the chances of a dangerous strike this century might be as high as one in 10.

But NASA doesn't much care to spend money on identifying and diverting space rocks, though, partially because that effort doesn't require as many astronauts as would be needed for a moon base. In the meantime, though, Helms' Air Force is funding a project that should help us identify many near-Earth objects that we haven't been able to see thus far.

The Air Force might have a big role to play in any space-rock project n but it probably would be better to house such an effort under the roof of a civilian agency such as NASA.

A new president and a new Congress will have the opportunity next year to reassess NASA's spending priorities. Let's hope that we become a little less moonstruck.

Our guess is that potential astronauts still will find plenty of incentive to pursue their dreams. After all, saving the world still makes for a pretty good day at the office.