President Bush has outlined his new, master plan for American space exploration, and it looks to me like tremendous progress. When the International Space Station is completed, the Space Shuttle will be retired from service, and in the meantime the central development program, folding over much of the work done on the Orbital Space Plane, will be Project Constellation, which incidentally I think is a terrific name. A name straight out of the grandest traditions of seafaring.
There is some new funding in the budget, but not much; most of the development money is coming from reapportionments within NASA. And by 2008 we hope to see an unmanned prototype of the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will have been produced by (and presumably will take its name from) Project Constellation. And if Boeing's artwork is anything to go by, the system should be modular and highly versatile, perhaps even suitable for use in a mission to Mars (which is one of Robert Zubrin's major talking points and a position with which I have to agree most strongly). http://boeingmedia.com/images/search.cfm...
A manned return lunar expedition, with the intention of establishing a permanent presence (careless word choice in the press means that this venture is continually described as "colonizing" the moon, which is like saying that the international research teams on Antarctica have colonized that continent) is targeted for 2014. The President allowed a few years' leeway-saying that the manned lunar expedition should come no later than 2020-but I see no reason why 2014 cannot be achieved. And while, unfortunately, no explicit Mars declaration is given, date in hand, it seems clear that Mars is the ultimate goal. In its own statement regarding the President's plan, the Mars Society recognizes a key cusp in the achievement of the entire agenda: 2009. http://www.marssociety.org/news/2004/012...
As they argue quite cogently, the 2009 Administration will have the Crew Exploration Vehicle largely in hand, and will be poised to make a decision about what to do with it. This situation is largely a consequence of the fact that the money currently allocated for the project over the next few years will suffice for accomplishing Project Constellation, but not for any of the purposes proposed for the vehicle that results. So in 2009 it will be time to decide whether to use the CEV simply to service the International Space Station (a lamentable waste and an outcome that I find highly unlikely), or to carry out a new manned lunar exploration program, or to embark on a genuine program to send humans to Mars, by a specified date, and to use lunar missions simply as part of that development program. This last course is the one advocated by the Mars Society, and the one which makes the most sense to me, by far.
