Mars Society
UK News Release
Contact
: Bo Maxwell, President, Mars Society UK
Date : For immediate Release, 14th January,
2004
Phone
: 0709 280 5915
Bush's Announcement:
A Missed Opportunity?
Mars
Society UK experts are available to talk on 07092 805 915 in response
to President Bush's space policy speech of the 14th January.
Following
today's announcement calling for a massive expansion of America's human
space flight programme, experts from the Mars Society UK responded with
disappointment. "This is genuinely an opportunity missed," commented
Bo Maxwell, Mars Society UK President. "While this speech attempted
to echo much of Kennedy's famous statement that America chooses to go
to the Moon, George Bush failed in one important fact: he did not give
NASA a clearly-stated goal. Instead what we have is a series of technology-driven
exercises that have been linked together to try and form a progressive
space programme."
Calling
for NASA to complete the International Space Station before effectively
abandoning it (or turning it over to America's partners, as the President
put it), the announcement went on to string together the ideas of a
new, high-tech Crew Exploration Vehicle, a hugely-expensive industrial
base on the Moon and the concept of - at some unspecified point - sending
humans to Mars in a speech that was high on ideas but light on substance
and direction.
"What
we have here is a complete failure of vision," Maxwell stated. "The
fact of the matter is, NASA is at its best when it is focused on a single
goal, as in was in the 1960s with Apollo. Since that time, the agency
has stumbled around, pinning its hopes for human space exploration on
one high technology project after another, with no real purpose or goal.
Which is a shame, because, as the Mars Society has repeatedly shown,
the technology required to take us to Mars is available to us now. If
we were to start tomorrow, we could realistically have humans walking
on Mars in 2018 - two years ahead of Bush's plan to get humans back
on the Moon, and for a cost of some $70 billion dollars."
Referring
to the Moon, Maxwell said, "Of course there is value in exploring the
Moon. But the idea that it is somehow a better place from which to undertake
missions to Mars simply does not stand up to any kind of examination.
If we really want to get serious about exploring the Moon, we can do
so far more effectively through the use of robots under the direct control
of scientist and engineers here on Earth - something we simply cannot
achieve with Mars, where our robots must remain slow automatons."
Called
Mars Direct, the Mars Society plan is clear in its goal and in the technology
needed to achieve it - all of which can be developed here on Earth and
tested here or in low Earth orbit using the International Space Station.
It represents the most cost-effective of sending humans to Mars and
back, and became the forerunner of NASA's own Mars Design Reference
Mission, which itself opted to go directly to Mars from the Space Station,
without ever needing to utilise the Moon.
While
Bush's announcement may have fallen wide of the hoped-for mark, the
Mars Society will continue to work towards encouraging NASA and other
organisations to think sensibly about the human exploration of space.
Notes for Editors
The
Mars Society is a worldwide organisation active in over 40 countries
around the world, with many of its members actively engaged in space
research and development. The goal of the Society is the human exploration
of Mars, and to support this the Society undertakes a wide range of
research activities, including the operation of a series of Mars Analogue
Research Stations in which teams of scientists and engineers perform
real-world field studies into living and working in Mars-type environments.
The most recent of these stations will be operated by the Mars Society
in Europe, and is to be located in Iceland. The Mars Society is also
responsible for the Mars Direct mission proposal which revolutionised
world-wide thinking in to how human Mars missions could be undertaken.
END
