Ride Report Projects Moon, Mars Goals

After a year-long study of the future of the U.S. space program, astronaut Sally K. Ride on Wednesday outlined four potential initiatives for the 1990s and beyond, including a permanent outpost on the moon and landing an astronaut on Mars as early as the year 2005.

Details of the possible long-range objectives will be given in a report to National Aeronautics and Space Administration officials, due early next month, that will lay out options for the civilian space program beyond the projects already under way.

In addition to a lunar outpost permanently occupied by 25 to 30 astronauts and a year-long mission to Mars, Ride’s report to NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher will describe in detail an extensive proposal for unmanned exploration of the solar system and an intense international program of Earth observation as other potential objectives for the space program.

Ride, who was the first American woman to fly in space, outlined her proposals in an appearance before the House Science and Technology subcommittee on space and applications. She said that a yearlong trip to Mars and back could be launched by 2004 if the U.S. space station project stays on schedule and permits intensive life science studies to begin in the 1990s.

Her report will outline a phased exploration program that would start with the landing of unmanned vehicles to sample the Martian surface, continue to three-week-long surface explorations by astronaut teams, and to plans for a permanent Martian station by 2010.

In her initiative emphasizing Earth exploration, Ride said her report will recommend that a series of orbiting platforms be launched by the United States, Japan and the European Space Agency, beginning in 1991.

Intense robotic exploration of the solar system, she said, could begin by 1996, with the launching of a surface rover to collect samples from Mars and return them to the U.S. space station in Earth orbit, and three spacecraft could be sent on a six-to-seven-year journey to Saturn in 1998.

“By the year 2000,” she said, “we would have samples of Mars back here on Earth to study.”

Ride’s report will be released a little more than a year after a landmark study of future space objectives was conducted by the National Space Commission, headed by former NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine.

The Paine report, suggesting the manned exploration of Mars as the logical step from the U.S. space station and a permanent base on the moon, was acclaimed for its detailed outline, but it was overshadowed in the aftermath of the January, 1986, explosion of the shuttle Challenger.

Rep. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), chairman of the subcommittee that heard the preview of Ride’s report Wednesday, criticized NASA and the Reagan Administration as having failed to make a formal response to the Paine panel’s recommendations.

Despite constant effort for more than a year to get an Administration response, he said, the Congress is still without recommendations for long-term space objectives. “This is the kind of thing that we ought to be giving some high visibility,” he said.

Nelson, who was aboard the shuttle mission that preceded the Challenger accident, said that Ride’s testimony would open long-term consideration of space objectives by the subcommittee.

Ride was a member of the presidential panel that investigated the Challenger accident. After release of the accident report, she was named an acting assistant administrator of the agency and undertook the study of potential long-range goals in space.

Her appearance Wednesday apparently is her last as an astronaut and space agency official. She will leave NASA next month to join Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Arms Control.