Just a week after NASA celebrated the successful landing of its Mars rover Spirit (see TFK 1/16/04), the space agency has new missions to dream about. In a speech last Wednesday at NASA's Washington, D.C., headquarters, President George W. Bush announced new plans to send astronauts back to the Moon by 2020. He also said NASA should eventually plan missions to take people to Mars. "Today, we set a new course for America's space program," Bush said. "We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe."
Critics questioned the spending of an extra $1 billion on space exploration, as Bush proposed. The U.S. already spends billions more than it takes in, they pointed out. "We shouldn't be going to outer space and sacrificing what we need to do here," said Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts.