Without delving into his motives for bringing it up, I am going to agree with President Bush that we need a new space race. But I don't think there is much interest in funding it. Even Bush is talking in terms of NASA funding increases that won't even keep up with inflation. One commentator said that the 5% was to be taken away from other parts of the NASA budget. If so, that's a 0% increase.

But looking at those new pictures from Mars should be inspiring. There is no question that we will explorer space, but the timetable is iffy.

Mankind has been presented with two gifts. One is a moon that a perfect place to practice traveling place to place in space. The other is a small planet that may hold the answers to all kinds of scientific question about time, space, and life. Mars is both earthlike and unearthly at the same time. We have only seen a snap shot of the planet's history, but it probably holds clues to the origin of the solar system.

As for using the moon as a jumping off place to the planets, there are good arguments pro and con.

The moon's low gravity and lack of atmosphere mean that a small rocket can eject a large payload into an interplanetary trajectory. But why pay even that penalty? A Mars space craft of enormous size could be assembled in orbit and sent on its way skipping the moon completely. That saves the energy needed to soft land on the moon and much of the energy needed to take off again. An earth-orbit launch would begin with a little more earth gravity to overcome, but overall the energy requirements would be less.

From earth orbit, there would be the advantage of using less power for a longer time, building up speed slowly. If you take off from the surface of the moon or the earth, you must overcome the gravitational pull rather quickly. And from the earth, you have atmosphereic drag to overcome.

An orbit-assembled space craft doesn't have to be as strong as one launched from the surface, mainly because of the gentle acceleration. Such a craft would probably be a light framework holding a number of modules together. No streamlining is required once you are above the atmosphere.

A Mars launch is only one of the reasons to go back to the moon. With 21st century technology, we can learn much more than the Apollo astronauts did way back in the late 60's and early 70's. I look forward to close up pictures of those early landing sites.

Did you know that some of the youngest craters on the moon are man made? Almost 40 years ago, Earth People started sending space craft to the moon. Most of the first one's impacted at thousands of miles per hour. Imagine crashing a metal object into soft, dry, powdery ground at those speeds! I look forward to seeing the size and shape of those newest craters. Not all of those craft struck at 90 degrees. Lunar landers that were left in orbit by astronauts returning to Earth were deliberately crashed into the moon, and they probably hit at a low angle creating a long eliptical crater unlike most lunar craters.

I used to tell my students that they were about the right age to be among the first humans on Mars. But it didn't work out. I assumed that people who were predicting a Mars landing in the first few years of the 21st Century were correct.
Unfortunately, it could still be 30 years away.
Howard