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.

"We think it is technically feasible to have a manned mission to the moon between 2020 and 2025 and then to Mars between 2030 and 2035," said Franco Ongaro, project manager of the ESA's fledgling Aurora space exploration program.

"We need to go back to the moon before we can go to Mars," he told an audience of space scientists, academics and industrialists.

"None of the people who worked on the Apollo program are around now. We need to learn how to walk before we can run," he added.

Ongaro denied there was open competition with the U.S. space agency NASA, and said he expected the Americans, Europeans and Russians -- all of whom have Martian goals -- to be in contact with each other.

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 present -- and in 2014 by a mission to bring Martian material back to earth.

Colin Pillinger, the chief scientist behind the missing Beagle 2 Mars probe that was supposed to land on the planet on Christmas day but was neve

r heard from, said it was crucial to find out if there was life there before a human arrives.

"You can sterilize a robot. But you cannot do the same to an astronaut. Inevitably a human will introduce microbes to the planet...and contaminate it," he told the meeting.

Having established whether there is or was life on Mars and proved the landing, take-off and re-entry technology, ESA then plans within a decade to send a manned mission to the moon to test new life-support systems.

It will also look closely at the physiological and psychological aspects of long duration space missions -- a worthwhile round trip to Mars would take nearly four years.

By 2026 the manned mission to the Red Planet will be nearly ready -- with a final robot mission to replicate the trip and test all the technologies -- followed in 2030 by a cargo mission carrying supplies ahead of the manned shot. Then, if everything goes according to plan, in 2033 the ESA's manned Mars shot will take off.

"This is a road map, a plan and plans change. But this is the most exciting space adventure," Ongaro said.

FMI: www.esa.int