CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Space station Alpha, increased robotic exploration and the Space Launch Initiative all will get humans to Mars faster than relatively small studies and planning, according to NASA chief Dan Goldin.
In his recent justification of why human exploration studies of the Red Planet are being shut down, Goldin said the work was minor compared to the multibillion-dollar efforts the agency has undertaken.
"I think this will get us to Mars faster because when you try and do too much, you do too little," Goldin said. "And getting the space station done and getting it complete and getting the assembly done, and getting the biomedical research done, is of a much higher priority than the dogs and cats of the small programs we were doing on getting ready for Mars."
A cadre of engineers at Johnson Space Center and other NASA sites had been working out problems with getting to Mars when they were reassigned to the International Space Station effort in February.
The action was prompted by a $4 billion cost overrun in the $96 billion program. Since the research outpost is the agency's cornerstone for the next decade, Goldin said it was easy to order the shift.
"The fact that we have freed up some hundreds of people from not working on all these secondary studies and architectural studies of going to Mars in no way holds us back," Goldin said.
Others interested in Mars say NASA should set aside a larger part of its budget for meaningful studies of the planet, not cut it out.
Mars Society President Robert Zubrin testified that Congress should allocate 1 percent of NASA's budget, about $140 million, to study ways to get people to the planet and live there for months at a time.
"While the Mars Society is in full agreement that many hard choices have to be made to remedy the cost overruns relating to the space station, we believe that this technology development program is too important to this nation's future in space to be sacrificed to feed space station overruns," Zubrin said.
Goldin counters that the agency is sending a fleet of probes to explore Mars, with that information accomplishing quickly and conclusively what would take engineers years to figure out and involve some guesswork.
President Bush's budget proposes an increase in unmanned Mars exploration during the next several years. The goal is to return a soil sample from the planet in 2011.
"By 2014, the recon is done on Mars," Goldin said.
That would be the second leg in the stool for humans to reach Mars, by Goldin's analogy.
The first would be the experiments onboard Alpha, such as radiation studies. Successful robotic missions, with soil samples, are the second and the $5 billion Space Launch Initiative is the third. The program to develop a replacement space shuttle is supposed to make spaceflight cheaper and safer.
Goldin has spoken for years of wanting to send people to Earth's nearest planetary neighbor. Recent developments have made the trip more appealing, such as signs of liquid water and a meteor from Mars that some scientists said contains marks of primitive microscopic life.
The soonest most expect such a mission is around 2020, though the agency has not officially adopted the idea as a focal point.
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