And Will We Ever Return?

By Dennis Overbye

The footprints are still there in the moon dust, as crisp as the day Armstrong and Aldrin clomped across our TV screens, barely eroded by the rain of cosmic rays and the tick-tick-tick of tiny meteorites. The spacecraft debris in Mylar wrapping, the golf balls and that aluminum American flag remain for all the % universe to see. Who would have thought that those modest monuments would go unvisited for decades -- that the age of exploration would come to a halt on that lonely spot?

Is there a way back to the moon? Not through NASA, which lost its clear sense of purpose after the Apollo program ended in 1972. The space shuttle proved fatally unreliable, and the proposed space station has been stuck on the drawing board for 10 years. With no vision to lift NASA, the agency is trapped in a downward spiral of mediocrity only slightly relieved by the brilliant repair of the Hubble telescope last winter. Administrator Daniel Goldin recently proposed a new mission: NASA should set a long-range goal of finding a habitable planet close to a nearby star. While this might have very long-term survival advantages for the human race, it seems unlikely to win the enthusiasm of a Congress that just canceled NASA's small appropriation for a radio search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Fortunately, NASA is not the only player, and a new international style of scientific endeavor is emerging. The nations of Europe, in particular, have formed consortiums to do together what they could not do alone. The European Space Agency, for example, has built the Ariane rocket, which competes with the U.S. shuttle in the satellite-launching business.

Last month ESA's science director, Roger Bonnet, unveiled a bold proposal: an open-ended program to colonize the moon. The program could begin as early as the year 2000 with exploration by robot orbiters and landers, followed by installation of automated scientific instruments. Finally, robots would build a base, which could be ready for human occupation in 2020, says Bonnet. A similar proposal has come from Japan, where a group called the Lunar and Planetary Society set out its own ideas for a robot-made moon base that could be built by 2024 for $28 billion. Both plans contain possibilities for collaboration, but Europe and Japan may shun NASA because of its record as an unreliable and bossy partner.

Heeding George Washington's advice about foreign entanglements, Americans have been reluctant to join organizations they cannot control. But it might be better for U.S. taxpayers -- and all humans who value exploration -- if NASA would drop its traditional take-charge role and join its peers abroad in a fresh assault on the final frontier.