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Thursday, Jan. 15, 2004

"I hope that by the president making this announcement, he'll put the horsepower behind it and sustain it for the long run," said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., the only current member of Congress to fly in space.

But from what Nelson heard Wednesday, the horsepower isn't there.

Bush is proposing an extra $1 billion for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration over the next five years for the new space initiative, an amount Nelson says is "nowhere close" to what will be needed.

The president also has directed NASA to reallocate $11 billion within its budgets over the next five years to cover the startup costs of sending astronauts back to the moon and, eventually, on to Mars.

The goal is to land astronauts on the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Neither Bush nor NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe offered a timetable Wednesday for putting humans on Mars, and neither offered specifics on the spacecraft that would replace the shuttle and carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit.

"Today we set a new course for America's space program," Bush said in a speech at NASA headquarters that was interrupted several times by applause. "We will give NASA a new focus and vision for future exploration. We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own."

Bush's election-year initiative represents the boldest space goals since President Kennedy laid the groundwork for the Apollo program that landed Americans on the moon in 1969, just eight years after the president committed the nation to the daunting goal.

Intended to inject new life into a space program shattered by last February's loss of the space shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven, Bush's proposal will require major technological advances, and it faces tough questions in Congress. Many Democrats say the administration should take care of problems at home before setting its sights on costly space initiatives, particularly in the face of budget deficits of about $500 billion.

Pelosi and Kennedy Unhappy

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the new space plan will face tough scrutiny. "As we go forward with any initiative we have to examine our priorities," she said. "We have serious challenges here on Earth."

And while professing support for space exploration, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said, "We shouldn't be going to outer space and sacrificing what we need to do here."

An AP-Ipsos poll this week found the public evenly split on Bush's plan. Just over half of Americans said it would be better to spend the money on programs such as education and health care rather than on space research.

Bush's father, President G.H.W. Bush, used the 20th anniversary of the first manned moon landing to call for moon colonies and a Mars expedition, but that less-detailed plan went nowhere. The estimated cost: $400 billion to $500 billion.

Glenn Favors Clinton's Globalist Plan

John Glenn figures the price in today's dollars might be close to double that, "at a time when we are running unprecedented deficits." The retired Democrat senator, the first American to orbit the Earth, would much rather see the International Space Station completed and operating at full capacity, as promised by the Clinton administration.

Under Bush's plan, the space shuttles would be phased out in 2010, the same time that the space station is finally finished with a minimum of U.S. input. A new spacecraft called the crew exploration vehicle would take over by 2014, capable of carrying astronauts not only to the space station but "beyond our orbit to other worlds," the president said.

O'Keefe said much could be learned from the proposed Orbital Space Plane that NASA had envisioned for ferrying astronauts to and from the space station. "We're not starting with a clean sheet of paper," he said.

O'Keefe said he did not know whether the crew exploration vehicle would resemble a capsule or a space plane, or whether it might be reusable like the shuttle.

"We've got to avoid getting fond of a design. We've got to get fond of the exploration requirement and agenda of what it's supposed to do," O'Keefe said.

To carry out his program, Bush created a panel, the Commission on the Implementation of U.S. Space Exploration Policy, to advise NASA. Pete Aldridge, a former Air Force secretary, was named to lead the effort.

The lunar push will begin no later than 2008 with a series of trailblazing robots, the president said. He stressed that humans would follow.

Some scientists contend it would be more efficient and less expensive to use robots instead of astronauts for exploring the solar system, such as the Spirit rover on Mars right now.

'Need to Touch'

"The human thirst for knowledge ultimately cannot be satisfied by even the most vivid pictures or the most detailed measurements," Bush said. "We need to see and examine and touch for ourselves. And only human beings are capable of adapting to the inevitable uncertainties posed by space travel."

John Young, among nearly 20 astronauts who attended Bush's speech, said the initiative was slower and more deliberate than the Apollo program that put him on the moon in 1972. "But developing the technologies is crucial. I think we can do that very cheaply and very fast," he said.

A methodical approach is exactly what's needed this time around, said Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, in December 1972.

"He said he once again wants to make NASA relevant. That says a lot," Cernan said.

In vivid terms, Bush portrayed the nation's space program, with its three shuttles grounded for the past year by the Columbia accident, as at a standstill.

"It is time for America to take the next steps," the president said. Bush added that other countries could join the effort, but O'Keefe emphasized it would be "very much" a U.S.-led endeavor.

NASA's Scott Hubbard, who served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, said this is the sort of national space vision that he and his colleagues were hoping for when they issued their report in August. After three decades without long-term direction, the space agency sorely needs a national mandate and a compelling mission requiring human presence in space, the investigators concluded.

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