Former Astronaut Says Plan To Mars Quickly Shelved

By ANN Associate Editor Pete Combs

"Let me give it to you straight," says Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL), a former NASA astronaut. "When the president announced this last week, I was one of his biggest cheerleaders. Only one week later, lo and behold, it looks like they dropped it like a hot potato."

Nelson was talking about the president's space iniative -- plans to establish a colony on the moon and send a manned mission to Mars. Nelson says, as of now, that plan has been shelved.

President George W. Bush "did not mention (the space initiative) in his State of the Union Address." Why? "They saw the polls that said 53-percent of the American did not support the space initiative. I'm very disappointed."

The president's plan calls for "concluding" America's obligations to the International Space Station and retiring the shuttles by 2010. The first in a new series of manned lunar missions wouldn't take place until 2014, leaving Nelson to wonder what would happen in the intervening four years. "If you do that, you dismantle your experienced work force and industrial base. We went through this drill before in 1975. We better not go through that again. I want to see the two overlap."

Those feelings aren't confined to the senator. "There is an awful lot of concern that this is the Bush administration's way of getting rid of the shuttle, not launching for awhile, then shutting down NASA," a KSC manager said. "Some people just don't trust the administration."

"You can't have a bold and visionary program like going to the Moon or Mars unless you explain to people why it's important," says Nelson. "You gotta show them the spin-offs of new technologies affecting our daily lives in medicine and micro-miniaturization and how that helps us -- the expansion of education by igniting kids imaginations so they start doing what they did in the '60s. But that hasn't been done. And if it isn't, this initiative is going to fizzle."

Nelson has logged more than 146 hours in space aboard Columbia in 1986. He was a payload specialist for the SATCOM KU satellite deployment. He is currently the only member of Congress to have been in space.

"This is the worst of all possible times to have a space initiative that's going to cost a lot of money," Nelson said in a telephone interview, "because our budget is hemmoraghing a half-a-trillion dollars a year. It's a tough time. It can be done -- if the president will lead it. I hope he will, but the first clues are that it's fizzled."

FMI: www.nasa.gov