KIDS DRAWN TO NASA YOUNGSTERS INSTINCTIVELY KNOW THEIR FUTURE LIES IN SPACE.

Byline: Charles Elachi 

RECENTLY, I had the pleasure of spending part of an afternoon with 150 fifth-graders at Shirley Avenue Elementary School in Reseda. We all put on 3D glasses and looked at panoramic pictures sent back by a pair of robot rovers busy inspecting the surface of Mars, hundreds of millions of miles away.

During the visit, the kids took part in a hands-on activity with a model rover brought by our Mars team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They also heard an astronaut talk about what it's like to train and prepare for travel in space.

The visit was immensely satisfying to me because I always enjoy spending time with young people. But I was also very moved when the teachers and administrators at the school told us what a major event our visit was for them and the children. Clearly, while space exploration interests adults, it is captivating for children. After all, space looks toward the future, which is where the children are headed.

The future involves a new vision for space exploration announced by the president earlier this year. The vision lays out an ambitious plan designed to take humans back to the moon and to Mars over several decades. We do not embark on explorations of this type only for what the science community learns about, say, the rocks and atmospheres on our neighboring planets.

These missions are just as important to us because of the inspiration they provide for our youths, and what they mean to the intellectual fabric of our nation as a forward-looking civilization.

The president's announcement established a policy that will lead to sustained exploration of the solar system. The key point here is the word ``sustained.'' This is an undertaking different from the space race of the 1960s, when we raced to the moon to show that our capabilities were better than the Soviet Union's. This is a more grounded, long-term approach based on scientific and exploration objectives. It is a journey, not a race.

As director of the NASA laboratory that has specialized in sending robots to other planets, I am often asked what it all means down here on Earth to the person on the street. If you're not a planetary geologist or a space buff, does this touch your life? I believe it does, in at least two ways.

First, there are the well-known spinoffs from the space program that improve our lives in unseen ways. Dental braces, rechargeable batteries, cordless power tools, cardiac monitors - all are made possible because of our investment in space. For every dollar the United States spends on the space program, it receives $7 back in the form of increased jobs and economic growth. And space exploration is arguably the most productive of all the sciences. In the past 30 years, NASA alone has accounted for 8 percent of the world's discoveries in all fields of science.

The other way that space touches our lives goes back to my thought at the outset here - the terrific inspiration it provides to our young people.

Science and technology are at the heart of what makes our nation a world leader today. If we want to maintain this preeminence, it is absolutely critical that we bring up our children to be technologically literate - skilled in math and sciences. Space exploration is a great adventure, a wonderful stimulus to our young people to nourish their intellectual curiosities.

You never know when it is going to happen, but I hold out the hope that on one of these NASA school visits, like our recent afternoon at Shirley Avenue Elementary, something will click in the mind of a girl or boy that will set them off on a life adventure to become a scientist or an engineer or perhaps even an astronaut. We are a nation of explorers, and the universe is calling.