NASA Reorganizes for Moon, Mars Mission NASA has created a new Office of Exploration Systems at its Washington headquarters to lead its new mission to the moon and Mars. The office will focus on development of the crew exploration vehicle that will take astronauts to the moon by 2020 under President Bush’s plan. President Bush said he will propose adding $1 billion to NASA’s budget over the next five years. More significantly, he said $11 billion in the existing $86 billion five-year budget will be shifted to the moon/Mars mission. That means programs not related to the mission will be cut or killed. Details are expected to emerge when the administration submits its 2005 budget proposal next month. The new office will immediately take over management of three programs, spokesman Michael Braukus said: •the orbital space plane, which is being developed to ferry crewmembers, but not cargo, to the International Space Station; •Project Prometheus, a program to develop a nuclear propulsion system for a proposed unmanned mission to Jupiter; and •the development of next-generation launch vehicles. Retired Rear Adm. Craig Steidle was named associate administrator for The Office of Exploration Systems. He is a former head of the Pentagon’s multibillion-dollar Joint Strike Fighter Program. Steidle told reporters he will take four to six months to review the requirements for the office’s mission before making programmatic decisions. He said preliminary designs for the orbital space plane could be a starting point for the crew exploration vehicle. The plane was projected to cost $11 billion to $13 billion and was scheduled to fly by 2008. A request for proposal for the vehicle was never released. Three teams of contractors have been working on development of the plane, led by Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Orbital Sciences Corp. with Northrop Grumman. The program is managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. The first casualty of NASA’s new era is the Hubbell Space Telescope. Administrator Sean O’Keefe announced Jan. 16 that a space shuttle mission to service the telescope next year has been canceled. Without that mission, the telescope might go dark in 2007 instead of its planned end date of 2010, officials said. O’Keefe said the mission was not scrubbed because of lack of money, but because it is too risky under new restrictions on space shuttle flights after the Columbia disaster. While the aerospace industry and space enthusiasts welcome President Bush’s initiative, it faces considerable opposition in Congress from members who want to use available resources to attack earthbound problems and from those who oppose additional spending that would further swell budget deficits.