CAN SPACE STILL SING?A FORMER ASTRONAUT URGES AMERICA TO REDISCOVER THE ROMANCE
OF SPACE EXPLORATION

When Michael Collins talks, people should listen. After all, he's been to
the moon.

Collins is talking now in a good new book, Mission to Mars (Grove
Weidenfeld). His argument is simple: We as a nation, and we as a
species, need to rediscover the excitement and exuberance of manned
space exploration. And Mars is the goal Collins selects as most
attainable and most appropriate for this next stage of interplanetary
effort.

Why Mars? For Collins it was always Mars, "You might say I went to the
wrong planet," he says of his Apollo mission. "I got sent to the moon,
but I've been fascinated by Mars since I was a kid." He feels, and
communicates in his book, the romance that surrounds the red planet in
our imaginations. Equally well communicated is the romance of
exploration, of humans moving out permanently through the solar system.

Many of us recognize that romance and recognize as well that the
public's love affair with space exploration has grown tarnished-which is
one of the reasons Collins wrote his book. The dream of space
exploration by humans, so vivid during the Apollo/ Skylab years, has
been buffeted by tragedy, budget cuts and deficits, technological
mistakes and miscalculations. A certain wariness can be felt in the general
public: Why spend more money on space when the money we've already
spent doesn't work? Why spend money out there when we have problems back
here?

The wariness is understandable, especially in light of continuing
government cutbacks and shortfalls in the domestic arena. "Clearly the
federal government faces challenges in taking care of citizens today,"
Collins says. "The problems are horrendous-crime, AIDS, education, health
care. But the space program doesn't take money away from those programs
and never has."

Funding for a Mars mission and the support architecture such a mission
would require will be controversial. Even conservative estimates of the
cost of building a space station, mounting returns to the moon, and
missions to Mars call for tens of billions of dollars. No small sums in the
best of times, such astronomical investments are easy targets in times
of recession. But Collins is persuasive and, I think, right when he
says manned space exploration and colonization is not about money. It's
about the future.

A case can be made-and Collins makes it-for space being among the most
practical uses of our taxes. "It's not sensible or reasonable to spend
all our resources on today, " ColIins says. "We've got to put aside a little
bit of every dollar for tomorrow."

No question that the money needs to be well spent. We're at a crucial
point in the evolution of our extraplanetary efforts.. It's a point
that demands careful consideration and reflection on the part of
taxpayers as well as the government and the space program itself. As
we assemble a realistic vision of renewed growth and effort aimed at
exploring the universe, our vision is informed by lessons learned over
the past three decades. We will be rebuilding our space program and
the equipment on which it rests, but we won't be starting from scratch.
Thirty years of advances in materials science, computer hardware and
software, understanding of complex propulsion systems, and yes, the
lessons hard learned from setbacks, mistakes, and catastrophes will all
help ensure that the next generation of vehicles and missions work
better, more efficiently, and more effectively than even the best of
previous undertakings.

They'll have to: Upcoming space ventures will be larger, longer, and
more complex than anything we've attempted. Above all, we must aim our
efforts toward establishing ourselves permanently in space, We can't
afford more dead-end missions aimed at political or other short-term
goals. We're dealing with the future, and we must take the long view.

"Exploration," Michael Collins says, "is NASA's lifeblood." He's right.
It's also the lifeblood of our species. It's a song that sings in all
of us. For the species, the whole of the species, the whole of the
world, to prosper and grow, we must continue to look outward, aim
outward, move outward. Mars, anyone?