On January 14, US President George Bush announced the he had set a human mission to Mars as a long-range goal after NASA, the US space agency, builds a base on the Moon.
According to the January 16 Washington Post, a senior Bush administration official said the impetus for the new space policy was Bush's desire to give NASA a clear mission after the February 1 disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia during its atmospheric re-entry.
Under the new policy, the fleet of three remaining space shuttles will be retired once construction of the International Space Station (ISS) is completed in 2010. The partially reusable shuttle will be replaced by a safer, wingless Apollo-type "crew exploration vehicles", no later than 2014. These will be used to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS, and to return astronauts to the Moon no later than 2020 to establish a lunar base as "a stepping stone" for future flights to Mars.
In July 1989, 20 years after Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the Moon, Bush's father announced a similar plan to have astronauts return to the Moon and then to undertake missions to Mars. However, Congress balked when the price tag — US$400 billion — was revealed.
In reviving his father's Moon-Mars exploration plan, Bush junior avoided indicating what it would cost, confining himself to announcing that he would ask Congress to increase NASA's budget ($15.4 billion in 2004) by an average of 5% per year over the next three years, and approximately 1% for the two years after those.
Bush claimed his Moon-Mars exploration plan is aimed at advancing "US scientific, security, and economic interests". In reality, it is being driven by the profit-making interests of the US aerospace corporations.
The January 16 Washington Post revealed that Bush's "renewed spirit of discovery" reflects "long-held ambitions of the US aerospace and energy industries". The Post went on to report: "For years, they have labored to persuade NASA to pursue interplanetary voyages more aggressively, with companies standing to reap billions of dollars from the contracts and spinoff technologies that would result... Among the companies that could profit from the plan are Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Halliburton Co., which Vice-President Cheney headed before he joined Bush's ticket."
According to the Post, the big aerospace corporations are "hungry" for new NASA contracts: "Many companies consolidated in the 1990s, with Boeing and Lockheed Martin emerging as by far the dominant contractors. One or the other oversees virtually every major NASA program, and a Boeing-Lockheed joint venture, the United Space Alliance, manages the space shuttle program.
"The companies had counted on a huge jump in commercial space business from the telecommunications industry, but when the internet boom went bust and when fiber optics replaced satellites as the medium of choice, commercial space launches evaporated."
Of course, the NASA corporate gravy train — even with a $400 billion (over 25-30 years) humans-to-Mars program — is small beer compared to the hundreds of billions a year that are funnelled into corporate coffers via the Pentagon's $370 billion-plus annual budget.
It is also small beer compared to the more than $350 billion a year that is shelled out to the big banks in interest payments on the US government's accumulated debt of $4 trillion — largely built up as a result of government borrowing to finance past Pentagon budgets.
From Green Left Weekly, January 28, 2004.
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