|
|
Clinton won't put person on Mars
But robotic mission still set
September 19, 1996
Web posted at: 11:55 p.m. EDTWASHINGTON (CNN) -- Americans won't travel to Mars as part of the U.S. space program, but the Clinton administration vowed Thursday to proceed with robotic exploration of the planet. (15 sec. /516K QuickTime movie)
Sending humans to Mars by the year 2019 was an unfulfilled dream of President George Bush when he was in office. He planned to start with a colony on the moon, then a manned mission to Mars. The estimated cost: more than $500 billion, none of which was appropriated.
"A lot has been made of backing off of a nonexistent commitment to humans going to Mars in 2019. That was never real," said John Logsdon of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.
Under the new Clinton administration policy, the United States will work on developing an international space station and a new generation of rockets and will begin a series of robotic trips to Mars.
"In December, we're going to launch a long-planned robotic mission to the surface of Mars and, believe it or not, if you've seen the movie, it lands on Independence Day 1997," Clinton said Thursday.
This summer's hit movie was "Independence Day," the story of an attempt by aliens to take over the world.
"We thought we'd go visit them first and try to get around that blowing up the Capitol and the White House business," the president said.
Scientists want to explore Mars for a number of reasons, one of which is to check out their new "life on Mars" theory. NASA scientists announced this summer they may have discovered ancient life on Mars after finding micro-organisms in a meteorite that fell to Earth from the Red Planet.
"The lessons that we're going to learn from these two missions and from follow-up missions to Mars and from our experience on the international space station will serve, we believe, as a vastly improved basis to determine the feasibility and the desirability of human missions to Mars," said White House Science Adviser John Gibbons.
Under the Clinton plan, satellites and shuttle missions will continue their role in support of defense and intelligence activities, giving the administration the ability to monitor military threats, nuclear nonproliferation agreements and international arms buildups.
The 17-page policy statement also clears the way for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to downscale its costs and projects in keeping with repeated budget cuts by Congress.
The plan also calls for more involvement in the commercialization of space activities, which Charles Walker of the National Space Policy Initiative called "too little, too late."
"We need to be making more investments," he said. "The only way we're going to pay tomorrow's bills is with income from new industry, from new resources."
As for the Mars mission, NASA's associate administrator for space science, Wesley Huntress, said the idea is to have "a continuing series of small robotic missions to explore the Martian surface in depth." NASA envisions sending robots every 26 months.
Correspondent Carl Rochelle and Reuters contributed to this report.
Related stories:
- The Internet: the final frontier for space watchers - August 28, 1996
- Mars Life Special
Related sites:
Note: Pages will open in a new browser windowExternal sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.
Tell us what you think!
You said it...
© 1996 Cable News Network, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.