To Mars . . . and beyond

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President Bush has set America on a bold new course for exploration and our aging, lethargic space program -- a bold step into the cosmos that could help expand our presence in the solar system within a lifetime.

The Apollo program of the 1960s and early 1970s, during the cowboy-era of space exploration, achieved its goal of putting Americans on the moon in a stunningly short eight years (stunning because most of the program, vehicles and procedures were developed from scratch in that short span).

However, since Apollo, the space program has become bogged down in a bureaucratic fen that has lacked political leadership and bold vision.

While the international space station sounded promising, it has amounted to a glorified Tinker Toy in search of a mission. The space shuttle, once the pride of NASA, is now the claxon that highlights that space administration's stagnancy and failure -- especially in light of the potentially preventable shuttle tragedies in 1987 and last year. But, even in their glory, the shuttles were little more than glorified rigs, meant to haul heavy cargo and perform some experiments, but hardly for direct exploration.

Coupled with tanked projects such as the technologically anachronistic space plane (essentially strapping astronauts and equipment to explosive fuel tanks), the space program's long-term exploratory future seemed even more doubtful.

The president's plan steamrolls over these problems, giving NASA a new mission and purpose: that, as a species, our destiny is to explore the solar system and beyond; that interplanetary travel will begin with stations on Mars; and that America, the sole recognized superpower, must lead in this endeavor.

"We do not know where this journey will end, yet we know this: Human beings are headed into the cosmos," Mr. Bush said last Wednesday. If this all sounds like "Star Trek" revisited, it is.

It's time we stopped circling our planet and began steering a course into the unknown -- as our forebears explored and charted the oceans and the Earth before us. Or, as Mr. Bush said Wednesday, our destiny is "to extend a human presence across our solar system."

In 1989, Mr. Bush's father, worrying about "this vision thing," also proposed a mission to the moon and Mars, but fiefdom battles in NASA, resistance in the Democratic Congress and a growing deficit killed the idea.