Ride Urges Resumption of Travel to Moon

Warning that the United States already has lost its leadership in two key areas of space exploration, astronaut Sally Ride urged the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in a report released today to return people to the moon by the year 2000 and use it as an orderly steppingstone to Mars.

America’s first woman in space called for a revitalized space program that will send Americans in an unhurried way outward into space and “from the highlands of the moon to the plains of Mars.”

But Ride, who is leaving NASA next month to work at a research institute in Palo Alto, cautioned against adopting Mars as a single-shot goal like the Apollo lunar landing project of the 1960s.

“There is no doubt that exploring, prospecting and settling Mars should be the ultimate objectives of human exploration,” her report said, “but America should not rush headlong toward Mars; we should adopt a strategy to continue an orderly expansion outward from Earth.

“Settling Mars should be our eventual goal, but it should not be our next goal.”

Ride sent the 63-page report to NASA Administrator James Fletcher last week and it was released to the press today.

Although Ride concentrated on future initiatives for NASA, she made it clear in her report that she believes the United States is relinquishing the space lead it has held for two decades.

As two examples, she said the Soviet Union has an ambitious plan to explore Mars with robots, while the United States has not sent a spacecraft there since 1976, and she said Soviet space station cosmonauts are now the “sole long-term inhabitants of low-Earth orbit.”