Details Emerge for Bush Plan of Back to Moon and On to Mars By Lon Rains and Brian Berger Space News Staff Writers And Leonard David Senior Space Writer posted: 03:00 pm ET 09 January 2004 WASHINGTON -- An historic new direction for the U.S. space program is expected to be announced by President Bush next Wednesday that will call for humans to return to the Moon and eventually journey on to Mars -- an ambitious adventure that will necessitate adding billions to NASA's budget. White House spokesman Allen Abney said Friday that Bush will make the space policy announcement Jan. 14 in Washington. Details about the venue for the announcement should be available early next week, he said. Abney would not say what that space policy announcement would entail, nor would he confirm reports that Bush signed a new space policy directive in December. Rep. Bart Gordon, (D-Tenn.), who is expected to be the ranking minority member of the House Science Committee this year, said Bushs announcement next week is expected to be both visionary and achievable and "welcome direction for a program that has drifted in the decades since Apollo last visited the Moon." Although still officially shrouded in secrecy, the essential elements of the plan have been widely reported by news media including SPACE.com during recent weeks. The salient points include: Construction of the International Space Station will be finished using the space shuttle, after which the fleet will be retired about 2010. Science operations aboard the station will concentrate on keeping human's healthy in space. The Orbital Space Plane project will become the Crew Exploration Vehicle and focus on designing a new human-rated spacecraft that will ferry astronauts to and from Earth and serve as the baseline for hardware that will take crews back to the Moon early in the next decade. With the shuttle fleet retired, the new initiative will rely on boosters such as the Delta 4 and Atlas 5, as well as international vehicles such as the Soyuz and Ariane. There are no immediate plans to develop a new heavy-lifting rocket in the Saturn 5 class. The space nuclear power effort known as Project Prometheus will be folded into this effort, which will focus on enabling new spaceflight technology that can be tested between Earth and the Moon before committing crews to longer trips to Mars. To pay for all of this NASA's budget will be increased by some $800 million in fiscal year 2005 and then bumped up about 5 percent each year after that. Early indications are that Bush's vision for the nation's space program will be greeted with bi-partisan support in the space community and from at least two congressman who will have a large role in approving any new plans for NASAs future. "I think in general this will be well received on Capital Hill. Thats not to say there wont be individual concerns and a lot of give and take in terms of how this thing is shaped," said Brian Chase, executive director of the National Space Society based in the nation's capitol. Gordon noted that only 58 years after the Wright brothers' flight, humans traveled into space. "Only eight years after those initial flights, two Americans landed on the surface of the Moon and left the first human footprints on another world," Gordon said. "While there have been exciting and important accomplishments in robotic space exploration over the last three decades, the nation's human space flight program has drifted, with no consensus on its goals. The president has both the opportunity and the responsibility to provide leadership in this area." A lack of vision for NASA was cited as a contributing cause of the Feb. 1, 2003 loss of shuttle Columbia. With no rudder to steer the space agency's course in the long term, certain cultural deficiencies crept in and set up the conditions that allowed the shuttle tragedy to take place. It was soon after the accident that Bush, under the leadership of Vice President Dick Cheney, assembled a team to look at the nation's space policy and provide a roadmap that will lead to the sweeping changes expected to be announced next week. Senior Producer Jim Banke contributed to this story from the Cape Canaveral Bureau