NASA's vision: First stop, the moon; next up, Mars

The new plan comes in the wake of Columbia exploding, after NASA was criticized for having no vision.
WASHINGTON POST
Many people grew up thinking of "Star Trek" as a documentary of the future. They were ready to be best friends with a Vulcan. Some of them may feel a bit betrayed. In his book "Lost in Space," Greg Klerkx asks the essential questions: "What happened to the Space Age? And how do we get it back?"
The answer, if you believe the NASA people, is the vision. The vision is a reaffirmation of the faith, an attempt to say that the Space Age lives.
But it's a vision hampered by inertial forces: the mass and momentum of the shuttle and the space station. The space program is an oil tanker that can't possibly turn on a dime. Thus the first items in this great new vision include a return to the tedious things we've been doing for three decades.
Exploration
The space station, however, will be dedicated to exploratory needs, such as studying the long-term effects of weightlessness on humans. NASA plans to send a robotic mission to the moon by 2008, laying the groundwork for the return of astronauts. In 2010, we'll retire the shuttle and build a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle. The plan is to send astronauts to the moon no later than 2020, and establish a moon base similar to what we've got down in Antarctica.
Eventually (the vision gets blurry here), we'll send humans to Mars, to the near-Earth asteroids, to the moons of Jupiter, wherever we want to go. We'll have busted free of low Earth orbit. The space agency will be dedicated to exploration.
The vision emerged from the wreckage of Columbia. After seven astronauts died aboard the disintegrating shuttle in February 2003, the accident investigation board said NASA not only had institutional flaws, but lacked any real vision. Meanwhile, a handful of White House staffers tried to figure out what the space program should do with itself. After nearly a year of effort (the definitive account of which can be found in "New Moon Rising," by Frank Sietzen Jr. and Keith Cowing), they produced the vision.
Crafting a plan
The president announced the vision Jan. 14, 2004. The new agenda grabbed the attention of the space community but never quite captured the public imagination. Bush didn't even mention it in his subsequent State of the Union address. During the presidential campaign, the future of NASA barely ranked as an issue.
But even this lack of attention is in keeping with the vision's strategy. It's not a crash program and supposedly won't require the psychic and budgetary energy that went into Apollo. The Vision's promoters want to avoid a repeat of the notorious Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), announced by the first President Bush in 1989. SEI had the basic vision conceits of a return to the moon and voyages to Mars. But that plan was a whale with suckerfish all over it. It had all kinds of shuttles and space stations and moon bases and Mars rockets and everything this side of starships screaming toward the Andromeda Galaxy. Rumors circulated that it would cost $400 billion, a number that spooked Congress. SEI went to the graveyard of government acronyms.
The vision has no official price, because it claims that NASA won't need any extra money to go to the moon and Mars. We'll go slowly, on the cheap. A skeptical observer might wonder how the government could inexpensively send people to another planet when it can barely afford to run trains from Washington to New York.
The vision emits a whiff of conflict avoidance. It's almost a stealth program, an attempt to tippy-toe to the moon and beyond by noncontroversial increments. In the near term, there's no singular moment when we decide, as a country, that we're definitely doing this. John Logsdon, the sage academic who runs a think tank called the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: "If you're really cynical, you could say that this plan makes that decision without a decision. ... If it works, one day we're there."
It's, like, oh, by the way, we're back on the moon.
Spirals
"We have to take this in spirals, take this in steps," NASA official Terri Lomax told an audience of university professors in Columbia, Md., recently. Spirals is the buzzword of the moment. Returning to the moon for a couple weeks is only Spiral 2; setting up a moon base for 90 days would be Spiral 3. This kind of talk scares some space folks. A spiral, they point out, is not exactly the shortest path between two points.
The incremental approach puts the vision at political risk. At the moment, NASA hasn't decided on the design of the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and even when that decision is made, the plan could be killed by Congress or a future administration. NASA is already making internal changes in homage to the vision (most notably, cuts in aeronautics research), but most of the big-ticket items would happen long after President Bush is gone. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and a proponent of rapid colonization of Mars, argues that Bush essentially said, "I think it's a good idea to go to the moon and Mars, and whoever is elected in 2012 can work on it."
Zubrin says that we could go to Mars right now if we had the political will. It's a long, dangerous trip (maybe six months one way, unless someone invents a really fast spaceship). But it's not clear that the public is sold on the idea. Film director and space buff James Cameron said the space community needs to build public support for this bold agenda, because otherwise "the dream will die with the first budget overage or first setback."