Hope on horizon 100 years after first flight as U.S. president considers new course

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - On the centennial of the world's first flight, high-speed travel seems to be at an all-time low.
The Columbia is gone. So is the Concorde. The remaining space shuttles are grounded. The space station is stalled.
Yet hope is on the horizon as President George W. Bush considers what might put the United States on a new course of space exploration. After three decades of sticking close to the home planet, astronauts may be headed back to the moon. The prize, this time around, may also include Mars.

The destruction of Columbia nearly one year ago forced the dreamy subject of real outer space sojourns from the back halls and labs of NASA, and from the bailiwick of starry-eyed mavericks, to Capitol Hill and the White House.
That alone gives believers reason for optimism, space travellers included.
Astronaut Edward Lu is encouraged by the examination of "overall goals of the space program. I think you need that organizing, big-picture view of where the program itself is heading."

If Lu was in charge, "I would put us on a course toward going back to the moon, eventually going to Mars, going out to asteroids."
He would treat the international space station, his home for six months this past year, as a testbed for learning the things needed to accomplish those lofty objectives.
His replacement aboard the space station, Michael Foale, another astrophysicist-astronaut, says the challenge is not building a Mars ship, a 10-year endeavour.
"Unfortunately, making your dreams and your wishes political reality is much, much more tricky," says Foale, who's living on the space station until spring.
After watching a full moon and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey from orbit, Foale says he's fired up about the possibility of a lunar base. He's also energized by NASA's Project Prometheus, a research effort into nuclear-powered rockets and generators that could dramatically speed up space travel.
"The space station is a good place to start from, but it certainly needs to be the stepping stone to somewhere else," Foale said wistfully last week.

Bush administration officials are sidestepping questions about whether the president will announce a grand, new space plan anytime soon. An interagency task force led by Vice-President Dick Cheney has been considering options since summer.
For weeks, many insiders have speculated that Bush might set forth goals on this week's 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers' famed flight on Dec. 17, 1903. Another possibility is his state of the union address in late January, painfully close to the anniversaries of both the Challenger and Columbia tragedies.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe and his deputies will be at Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Wednesday to mark the centennial. The space agency had always planned to take part in the festivities given its own achievements of the past century - most notably landing 12 men on the moon and sending probes to every planet in the solar system save Pluto.

The first American to orbit the Earth says that before deciding to race off to the moon or Mars, the nation needs to complete the international space station and provide the taxi service to accommodate a full crew of six or seven. The station currently houses two.
At the same time, Glenn says, NASA could be laying out a long-term plan, setting a loose timetable and investing in the engineering challenges of sending people to Mars. The only sensible reason for going to the moon first, he says, would be to test the technology for a Mars trip.

Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who now teaches at Duke University, doesn't expect much in the way of a fresh, long-range space vision from Bush - or NASA.
"Space is a motherhood issue: Everybody's in favour of it; nobody wants to do anything that will sort of critically disrupt the status quo," Roland says.

For NASA planetary scientist Everett Gibson - who has been scrutinizing moon rocks ever since the Apollo astronauts brought them back - any space policy is better than no policy, as has been the case for sometime.
"The development of a national commitment or a national space policy is something that is needed in this country, and I'm speaking now as a citizen, not as a government employee," Gibson says. Youngsters need to be inspired and the dreams of exploration kept alive "whether that's the moon or to Mars or exactly where."

For Bush to propose a return to the moon 100 years after Orville and Wilbur Wright took the first-ever powered flights leaves some space buffs yearning for more, however.
"Now anyone who's really studied this knows that we are much better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to send men to the moon in '61," says Robert Zubrin, the zealous president of the Mars Society.
"If we are, in fact, the inheritors of the Wrights, and Lewis and Clark, that's what we should do and I would submit, we cannot afford not to be inheritors. We cannot afford to become less than the people who have gotten us to where we are."

Zubrin says late January would be an ideal time for Bush to pitch a human expedition to Mars. By the time of the state of the union address, both of NASA's Mars rovers should have reached the Red Planet, trailing a European Mars lander by just days.

"Look, we had humans on the moon six times. We have 700 pounds (317 kilograms) of lunar rocks sitting at Johnson Space Center that nobody even bothers to look at," Zubrin says in a rapid-fire voice, getting more excited as he gets warmed up.
"The moon is a rock; Mars is a world with a complex history. So Mars is the Rosetta stone for letting us know about the prevalence and diversity of life in the universe."
It's also the key test "that's going to determine whether we can ever become a multiplanet species," a challenge that's been staring NASA in the face since 1969, he said.

Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise agrees that the long-term goal of the space program should be "to plant the human race elsewhere."
"We need to use our God-given talent, which we uniquely were given," Haise says. "There's no other creature I know of that ever will build a starship. Dolphins are smart, but I don't think they're going to build a starship."

Even the head of NASA's space science office acknowledges that Mars may well hold the key to some of humanity's deepest questions. But he urges a stepping-stone approach with robots leading the way.
"When John F. Kennedy decided we were going to go to the moon in the early '60s, NASA didn't just go off and build the TAB Capsules, Gemini and Apollo," says Edward Weiler.
He rattles off the spacecraft that preceded the moonmen: Rangers. Surveyors. Lunar Orbiters.
The Mars program is similar, Weiler said. "Every single mission we have on our Mars program is paving the way for humans."
If the ultimate goal is to search for life on Mars, any mission there - a tremendous expense - should be aimed at the best spot to search for life, he said. The Red Planet is slightly more than half the size of Earth.

No one knows how NASA would pay for lunar camps or Mars expeditions. The last time a president pushed such ambitious ideas - the first president Bush on the 20th anniversary of the first manned moon landing - the estimated price tag was $400 billion to $500 billion US.
"We can't have another one of these big glorious programs that we take lots of credit for but put no money behind," says Glenn.
He says he'd be skeptical of any program that just sets a date with no budget, something amounting to a false promise.

NASA's paper trail is littered with other expensive drawing-board flops: a national aerospace plane that designers as little as a decade ago expected to be ferrying average folks into space by now; commercial hypersonic craft hyped as being able to fly passengers from New York to Tokyo in two hours flat, at five times the speed of sound.
The supersonic Concorde got passengers between Europe and New York in just over three hours at twice the speed of sound for three decades. But that, too, is gone. The last commercial trans-Atlantic flight was in October, a casualty of brutally high costs.

The ongoing war against terrorism and the burgeoning deficit certainly complicate matters for any new NASA venture.
Space enthusiasts, however, point out that Vietnam did not stop Apollo, nor did the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts on the launch pad.
"Of course, the Columbia is what posed this whole issue, right?" asks Zubrin. He believes if the nation is willing to risk human life for space exploration, "we ought to be striving for the goals that are worthy of those risks" - not repeated jaunts in low-Earth orbit.

Here is my Mars speech for Toastmasters.

Feel free to copy, spindle or mutilate it:

Mr. Toastmaster, as you know this speech is a on a topic that we feel passionately about.

As a country we seem to be like the wife of an abusive husband waiting for her next beating.

Life has a certain feeling in this country of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

On top of it we have lost our technological edge. It was recently widely reported that the United States lost the title of the fastest computer to Japan.

We seem to teeter on our foreign policy goals.

Financially times are uncertain as well, everyone seems to be scared of losing their jobs. People realize that job security doesn’t exist today as it did for their parents, when 30 years of working for a company brought one a gold watch and a healthy retirement check.

Just as at home our rest seems less restful, our enemies seem less clearly defined than they did in the days of the cold war.

What is it that we are lacking?

I ask you, the audience, and this isn’t a rhetorical question.

Yes, all good answers.

What we are lacking is a clear-cut goal, and an initiative which harnesses our creative intelligence as a nation.

What should our national goal be?

Well, survival is a goal and that seems to be what our goal has become. However this and the goal of staying the number one global power, this is ineffective as a goal because it doesn’t give us any direction.

Motivation experts admonish us not to have a negative goal, For instance, the goal I will lose weight is not a good goal because it focuses on what you don’t want, weight.

I will eat 3 or more servings of fruit and vegetables daily is better because you focus on what you CAN do.

In looking for this national goal I am going to suggest a goal that in our past that propelled us forwards.

In the modified words of John Fitzgerald Kennedy: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out of landing a man on Mars and returning him to Earth safely.

Before you pronounce this idea as absurd, let me explain how this goal would address of the problems I mentioned earlier.

First of all, it is apparent that a strong American space program is the same thing as a strong America.

The military spin offs of space exploration are almost limitless.

Don’t forget that military technology proliferates.

If we rest on our laurels, people who hate us will develop nuclear technology and missile delivery systems.

And the lesson of 9-11 is that our enemies are not resting on their laurels.

The driving force of the American economy is technological innovation. Many economists accurately said that the economy of the nineties was flat but the tech sector was so strong that it pulled the rest of the economy with it.

How did American become the world’s leading technical innovator?

I would argue that much of the impetus came as long term spin off from the Apollo space programs and Reagan’s Star Wars initiative.

In addition to technology, many breakthroughs in the fields of engineering, medicine, plastics, aviation, and electronics came from these programs.

The problem currently is that corporations owe it to their shareholders to return profits in the current quarter. This stifles long-term research and investment.

And since winning an election has become so expensive, politicians are more concerned about filling their campaign coffers than long-term strategy of anything outside political survival.

The investment in high tech research and manufacturing necessary to put a man on Mars would be a tremendous boast to the economy and have spin off effects for decades.

It would also help the increasing unemployment.

Not only would it have these advantages, but this new found space agility would benefit the entire world in other ways. How many of you remember the asteroids hitting Jupiter a couple of years ago.

And often times in the news it is noted that an asteroid narrowly missed us. As it currently is, we have absolutely no defense against this.

To develop the capacity to defend against this eventuality would also help us with missile defense. And both of these programs would benefit from a manned mission to Mars.

And although many would decry this as a budget boondoggle, I would say that it would force the government to redefine it’s priorities and make it more efficient. It would have to be more efficient and channel the nations resources more carefully.

In conclusion, fellow Toastmasters, I ask you to remember the exhilaration of watching Neil Armstrong taking one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

And join me in supporting the growing movement onward and upward into space.

So since you disagree with my "agenda", then can I assume that you're implacably opposed to a U.S. space program?

Absolutely.

It's time to turn it over to the civilian sector.

NASA has proven itself to be a cesspool of self-serving bureaucratic turf-protectors for the last time.

They knew about the tile damage on Columbia, and they did nothing because the NASA culture is more akin to Enron's than to an organization guided by science and engineering.

And I see no reason to believe that a government-controlled endeavor will ever be any other way.

All they will ever care about is getting their budget approved.

Everything else is irrelevant.

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