PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA should drop the idea of quick-hit missions to Mars in the style of the Apollo lunar program and instead adopt a longer view, a former Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) director said Saturday.

"Apollo is not a particularly good model for the exploration of Mars," said Bruce Murray, a Caltech planetary scientist who led the NASA lab from 1976 to 1982, speaking on Saturday at the 112th annual meeting of The Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Red Planet Round Table

Futurist Larry Niven takes an extremely long view of Mars, warning us that "we won't find the Mars of our childhood" until we build it -- otherwise, "all else is beyond our ambitions." Want to Learn More?

Back in the near term, Louis Friedman , executive director of the Planetary Society, exhorts NASA to push more vigorously to get to Mars, even if it ends up costing more money. Want to Learn More?

And NASA chief Dan Goldin says the recent Mars missions were indeed underfunded, but denies the idea that more money would have made a difference. Want to Learn More?

The American space agency, humbled by the recent loss of two separate missions to Mars, is in the midst of reordering its campaign to explore the Red Planet, with an announcement of its plans expected later this summer.

Since the losses of the Mars Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander, NASA has been giving Mars missions the thumbs-up -- or down -- on case-by-case basis.

And although sending humans to Mars has remained a vague goal, the upcoming batch of missions was to culminate in the robotic return of Martian rock and soil samples to Earth.

But such an approach weakens the program overall, Murray said. Mars exploration, he argued, should be a longer-term endeavor that will outlast many presidencies, Congresses and, indeed, the life spans of many of us alive today.

"Weve got to get beyond thinking, Whats the next mission, " Murray said. "So long as we sell it mission-to-mission, or sample return, its going to be fragile."

Murray said NASA should sketch out a grander vision of Mars, one that links together the now disjointed robotic and human components.

A first step toward doing that, Murray said, would be to pick specific targets on the surface of Mars. There, robotic missions could set up shop, performing valuable scientific work, but also setting the stage for eventual human missions by collecting and hoarding resources, such as power and oxygen, that astronauts would need.

"Outposts would give a goal to the robotic program and provide the stepping stones for human flight," Murray said.

Such an outpost, with its own living quarters, communications link, launch pad, power plant and scientific laboratory, would resemble in nature McMurdo Station in Antarctica, established in 1956 and now home to researchers year-round.