Shooting for the moon?

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Many who come to Washington have stars in their eyes. They have a vision for making the bureaucracy better and the Beltway less corrupt -- even though they have no idea how to turn on their vacuum cleaners. Yet each person has a different version of the vision, so instead of a thousand points of light, the result is a galaxy of incandescent individuals.

NASA has not been immune to collisions of vision. For some time, the agency's manned space program has been star-crossed by costly conflicting conceptions of the next step outward.

Those discussions have taken flame since the demise of the shuttle Columbia. Since August, a White House policy group has been debating new visions for manned space flight, and earlier this fall, House and Senate committees held hearings on the same subject.

The Bush administration reportedly hopes to renew exploration of the moon to further scientific research and give NASA a clear goal.

NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, a member of the administration review group, has steadfastly refused to discuss its possible recommendations. Nonetheless, potential options are pretty well known.

There are three destinations Mr. Bush could aim for. The Planetary Society and the Mars Society are lobbying for an exploratory flight to Mars, followed by the establishment a permanent human settlement. Dry as it is, Mars may have once had running water, out of which bacterial life might have risen. Other mysteries also await, and the planet has long had a hold on the human imagination. For the next several decades, Mars will remain the ultimate destination for human discovery.

However, Mars is also, on average, almost 50 million miles away from Earth. It would take astronauts months to arrive, and they would face the dual dangers of long-term exposure to radiation and losses in bone density that accompany long flights. It would also cost billions. Maintaining political momentum might be problematic, since even if a Mars mission were announced tomorrow, it would not likely launch until after the end of Mr. Bush's second term.

Instead of taking a great leap to Mars, others, including the National Space Society, have argued man should first take the small step back to the moon, to permanently establish a colony. While not as fecund as Mars (it has changed little in billions of years) and even drier, the moon still has plenty of unsolved mysteries.

A base on the moon could serve as a staging point for more distant missions, and a testing area for the technologies they would require. However, a permanent moon settlement would also be expensive to establish. While lunar industries might develop, their payoff would be decades away.