Space Gurus Snub Lunar Base, Set Sights on Asteroids, Mars

If we don’t put a man on Mars in my lifetime, I’m going to be very disappointed.

We put many men on the moon almost 40 years ago. In the meantime, instead of attempting to do something extraordinary, we’ve pissed our money away on such hits as the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle program. Neither can go into deep space. 

With the Shuttle retiring in 2010, a perfect opportunity presents itself. We can choose to take on challenges like going to Mars. By the looks of this Aviation Week article, it looks like we’re finally getting serious about doing just that.

Some of the most influential leaders of the space community are quietly working to offer the next U.S. president an alternative to President Bush’s “vision for space exploration”–one that would delete a lunar base and move instead toward manned missions to asteroids along with a renewed emphasis on Earth environmental spacecraft.

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Numerous planetary managers told Aviation Week & Space Technology they now fear a manned Moon base and even shorter sorties to the Moon will bog down the space program for decades and inhibit, rather than facilitate, manned Mars operations–the ultimate goal of both the Bush and alternative visions. The first lunar sortie would be flown by about 2020 under the Bush plan.

If alternative-vision planners have their way, the mission could instead be flown to an asteroid in about 2025.

Participants in the upcoming meeting contend there’s little public enthusiasm for a return to the Moon, especially among youth, and that the Bush administration has laid out grandiose plans but has done little to provide the funding to realize them on a reasonable timescale.

Planners say the Bush plan is beginning to crumble, with only companies that have won major funding still enthusiastic about the existing plan.

“It’s becoming painfully obvious that the Moon is not a stepping-stone for manned Mars operations but is instead a stumbling block,” says Robert Farquhar, a veteran of planning and operating planetary and deep-space missions.

The prospect of challenging new manned missions to asteroids is drawing far more excitement among young people than a “return” (as in going backward) to the Moon, says Lou Friedman, who heads The Planetary Society, the country’s largest space interest group.