I think my theory is more viable because it only requires a few butt-covering lies and not a conspiracy. But I guess we'll see.

1. School gives laptop to student
2. Student reports laptop stolen, takes it home
3. School activates security feature, randomly catches student popping pills while doing homework
4. IT sends photo of student to principal to get laptop back
5. Idiot principal gives student "don't do drugs" talk instead
6. Student panics, tells parents the school is spying on everyone
7. Parents sue school
8. Media frenzy!

The previous comments list some good targets. When you go looking for them with your 4" telescope, here are some suggestions for giving your students the best viewing experience. First off, when hunting for deep-sky objects like galaxies and nebula, wait for the Moon to go away. Otherwise it will light up the sky and wash everything out. Also, you're lucky if you live in a rural area, but if you don't, see if you can get away from the city lights. Bringing a chair or, even better, an adjustable stool will help your students to look through the telescope. This gives your eye some stability and is usually compared to increasing your aperture by an inch or so in terms of the detail you will see. Have your students sketch what they see. If they've forgotten how to draw, have them take some photos of the Moon through the telescope with their cell phones. It's easy to look at Mars and see a red ball, but if you have to draw it on a piece of paper, you notice all the details that you would have otherwise ignored. Finally, some color filters might be a good investment. They can help increase the contrast for planetary targets, you can swap them out and compare what you see with each color, and you can have your students come up with an explanation why they see different details through each filter.

Picking a platform and sticking with it is what got us the stupendously expensive Space Shuttle and ISS. If an approach is demonstrably not working, we shouldn't just "stay the course" and hope for the best, we should try something new. What the Augustine committee found was that NASA was incapable of simultaneously operating a launch system while building a new one. NASA's current plan is to build two and operate them simultaneously. This plan is going to leave us stranded in low Earth orbit even if we eventually get a heavy lifter. All the alternatives would only field a single new launcher, and many of them make effective use of the resources we have already put into Ares I + Ares V. So far, we're maybe halfway done with Ares I, but it's a rocket we don't need and will cost at least $1 billion per year to operate if we finish it. Ares V hasn't even started yet, so, when comparing it to Saturn V and the alternatives, Ares V is the paper and Powerpoint rocket.

I'm afraid we're probably working with different definitions of what constitutes a colony. Admittedly we have a long way to go to get to self-sufficient space colonies. I cannot conceive of a definition that would be so far off that year-long space missions could be dismissed as an "amusement park ride".

Manned colonization of the cosmos is demonstrably not magical thinking. Over the past several decades we have come close to a permanent human presence in space, first with Mir, and then with the ISS. Self-sufficiency in space does still require some technological advancement, but we have within our grasp the ability to support a human settlement in Earth orbit. What has been missing until this point is the political will and economic incentive to make it happen. Calling those who accept this reality a "magical-religious cult" is unhelpful and ignorant.