UO astronomer expects NASA to skip moon walk.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Rather than another visit to the next-door neighbor, America should drop in on someone new when it takes its next big trip into space, University of Oregon astronomer Greg Bothun says.

President Bush may propose next week a return to the moon as a steppingstone for a trip to Mars, but Bothun says it would make more sense to head straight for Mars. After all, why waste time and money going back to a lifeless moon when you could go to the Red Planet, a whole world with tantalizing hints that it might once have harbored life?

That's why he doubts that the road to Mars will include a pit stop on the moon, regardless of what President Bush has to say in his upcoming space policy speech. "If this ever materializes on the NASA mission time line, I'm quite confident we will skip the part about going to the moon, because that's not necessary to achieve the main scientific objective of a manned mission to Mars," he said. "That's an incredibly expensive side trip."

Bothun thinks NASA privately has been steering a course for a Mars mission for a while and would get there in the next 20 years or so even without a presidential push. But unlike America's history-making race to be the first nation on the moon, he doesn't think putting people on Mars would be a one-country event.

Given the cost of such an undertaking and the conservative fiscal environment in Washington, a multinational collaboration is more likely, he said. That's bolstered by the fact that other nations recently have shown as much interest in space as the United States.

"I think it's politically naive in the real world today to believe this is a U.S.-only mission," he said. "And at the rate the Europeans and Japanese and Chinese are investing in their space programs, there's plenty of assets to collaborate with."

Mars fills the bill for the next great space objective for one reason: life. Bothun said a base on the moon won't bring people any closer to answering the greatest scientific question of the age, which is whether it's possible for life to form anywhere other than Earth.

He said that's a question that ultimately overrides budgets and politics and cross-border relations. The answer is so important that finding it might provide the same kind of thrust to a manned Mars mission that the America-Soviet rivalry gave to the moon race.

"Humanity needs to know scientifically whether the conditions for life occur here or whether they're more ubiquitous," Bothun said. "That's a pretty big question. I don't think you can put a price tag on answering that question."