Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

IN LAST week’s speech to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the first
Moon landing, George Bush, the President of the US, instructed the country’s
National Space Council to calculate the cost and the time needed to establish
a base on the Moon and to send people to Mars. The President also backed
an international space station that would be in orbit by the mid-1990s.

However, the political power has shifted in the US since President J.
F. Kennedy launched the race to the Moon. Bush has to pay more attention
to Congress, which is now in the process of approving NASA’s budget for
the coming year. The US’s space station, a central foundation of the country’s
ambitions in space, will cost about $19 000 million. If Bush wants his programme
to go ahead, he must lobby Congress to persuade it to approve funds for
the programme.

Throughout the early development of the space station, the project has
met opposition from within Congress. Among other doubts, they question whether
it is the best way to undertake space science. The programme has already
been delayed and drastically reduced in size. Now, NASA’s Langley Research
Center is reassessing the programme. The international partners in the space
station, the European Space Agency, Japan and Canada, have not been asked
to participate in this review.

In terms of setting a direction for the US’s space programme, Bush’s
speech was evolutionary, not revolutionary. It was a refinement of the policy
espoused by President Ronald Reagan at the beginning of 1988. Reagan committed
NASA ‘to expand human presence and activity beyond Earth orbit and into
the Solar System’. Since then, the debate has shifted to the strategy for
achieving Reagan’s objective. Should the US go straight to Mars? Should
it set up a lunar base then go to Mars or to Phobos (one of the moons of
Mars)? Or should it simply establish a lunar observatory? Bush’s speech
may have been thin on detail – for example, he set no timetable for a return
to the Moon and mentioned no costs – but NASA is already working on the
strategies open to the US. The administration’s Office of Exploration is
studying the technical feasibility of various options for exploring the
Solar System.

Frank Martin, the head of the office, says that the space station will
be essential: ‘If we destroy the space station, we will destroy our gateway
to the Solar System,’ he says. The space station will: enable NASA to study
how people live in very low gravity; give experience of assembling structures
in space; allow engineers to develop more sophisticated life-support systems;
and serve as a maintenance depot for the craft shuttling to and from the
Moon or Mars.

None of this will be cheap. Any plans for a lunar base or a mission
to Mars would, Martin says, require NASA’s budget to double. (It is currently
1 per cent of the federal budget but during the Apollo years, NASA’s budget
was about 4 per cent.) One proposal would involve a 10-year project to build
a base that could support 12 people. In the first six months, spacecraft
would transport accommodation to the Moon, followed by a small crew. The
crew would assemble the accommodation. Crews would stay for just 30 days
at first, then up to six months. After four or five years, the base would
support eight to 10 crew members (Technology, 15 July).

After the first couple of years, the crew would start to exploit the
Moon’s resources. At a later stage, NASA would be in a position to decide
whether to launch an expedition to Mars from the Moon or whether to expand
the lunar base.