First we'll establish a permanently manned MoonBase (Alpha ?)
And then maybe we can send a mission to land on the Sun - We'll land at night !
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President Bush will announce plans next week to establish a permanent human settlement on the moon and to set a goal of eventually sending Americans to Mars, administration sources said last night.
The sources said Bush will announce a new "human exploration" agenda in Washington on Wednesday, six days ahead of the final State of the Union address of his term and just as his reelection campaign moves from the planning stage to its public phase.
The plans grew out of a White House group that was assigned to examine the mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on Feb. 1, throwing the future of the space program into doubt.
Officials were unwilling to provide cost figures or details and would say only that Bush will direct the government to immediately begin research and development to establish a human presence or base on the moon, with the goal of having that lead to a manned mission to Mars. That endeavor could be a decade or more away, the officials said.
The last humans on the moon, the crew of Apollo 17, landed in 1972.
Even advocates within the administration said the new project is sure to be a difficult sell on Capitol Hill because of the huge costs at a time when the administration is projecting mammoth deficits for years to come, and had promised to cut the shortfall in half over the next five years.
Another objection is likely to be that the existing human space flight program is still struggling to recover from the shuttle accident. The shuttle fleet is grounded until at least September and is unable to resupply the U.S.-led international space station, which is currently relying on Russian vehicles and operating with a caretaker crew of two instead of the usual three. However, some space analysts have suggested that the very extent of the program's troubles may have helped generate a consensus around the notion that only a dramatic remedy would save it.
NASA's budget this year is about $15 billion, and officials there have been told to expect an increase in the budget the president will send to Congress in February.
Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, proposed a sustained commitment to human exploration of the solar system -- with a return to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars -- in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. NASA came up with a budget-busting cost estimate of $400 billion, which sank the project.
The United States currently lacks the scientific and technical foundation required to send humans to Mars, and scientists still find it daunting just to land a robot there safely, as the events of the past week have shown.
Any new moon or Mars mission would take years to develop, scientists said.
Advocates of a return to the moon, already successfully conquered, have argued that a lunar initiative would be useful scientifically and envision the moon as a base for developing technologies and rehearsing the dispatch of humans to a much more distant and isolated landing zone on Mars.
With the Saturn 5 moon rockets, now spread across the land as museum pieces, astronauts could reach the moon in about three days, while a trip to Mars could take six months or more. Any worthwhile lunar initiative would require the development of a substantial rocket, some analysts have suggested.
Sources involved in the discussions said Bush and his advisers view the new plans for human space travel as a way to unify the country behind a gigantic common purpose at a time when relations between the parties are strained and polls show that Americans are closely divided on many issues.
The sources said Bush aides also view the initiative as a huge jobs program, and one that will stimulate business in the many parts of the country where space and military contractors are located.
"This is a boon for business and a boon for Texas," one official said, referring to the state where Bush was governor and the location of the Johnson Space Center, which is the home of mission control and the nerve center for human space flight.
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