ESA Denies Competing With NASA

While NASA prepares for President Bush's new space initiative, which includes manned flights to Mars, the European community is also setting its sights on the red planet. A European could step out onto the surface of Mars within three decades, under European Space Agency (ESA) plans spelled out on Tuesday. The plans are more precise than the broad U.S. goals of sending a man back to the moon by 2020 and to Mars by 2030, revealed last month by President Bush. Under ESA plans, there will be a mission in 2007 to test a vehicle that can withstand far higher re-entry speeds than currently experienced by those returning from the moon. This will be followed two years later by ExoMars, a robot mission to Mars in search of life -- past and