The Red Planet has its secrets

George Bush Junior is finishing his father’s unfinished agenda. First he captured Saddam, now he intends to send Americans to Mars. Bus...

George Bush Junior is finishing his father’s unfinished agenda. First he captured Saddam, now he intends to send Americans to Mars. Bush Senior had dreamed about this in 1989, but could not succeed because of the high costs. George W. Bush’s space adventure should be viewed against the backdrop of China’s recent manned space mission and the European Union’s finalising of its project on a global positioning system called Galileo, challenging the existing American GPS monopoly.

As per the latest announcement, the US will send astronauts back to the moon by 2015-20. The Americans are planning to establish a permanent base there. Such base is expected to help them in fulfilling the dream of a manned Mars mission. The recent success of unmanned missions to Mars appears to have further boosted the confidence of the American space technologists which otherwise had dipped after the Columbia space scuttle disaster.

This decision by Bush has raised a debate on the efficacy of such costly projects. It has been argued that in an election year Bush intends to tickle Americans’ nationalist pride by making such announcements and divert attention from Iraq. Plans for the moon will require an extra $12 billion over the next five years. It is said that $11 billion of that would come from reallocation of NASA funds. Hence, the project appears to be financially viable.

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However, this project should not be seen only in terms of America’s electoral calendar. In fact, it completes the collage of “global space politics”. Post-Cold War, Americans have dominated the space arena both for commercial and military purposes. They had a total asymmetric advantage against their enemies during the Gulf wars and the Afghanistan and Kosovo conflicts. But recent challenges by the Chinese and the EU probably have forced the US to rethink. China plans to send a robot to the moon by 2010. British scientists have made an attempt, though unsuccessful, to explore Mars. India also plans to undertake a mission to the moon. Most importantly, Russia plans a Mars flight by 2014.

The base on the moon is expected to help the Americans in saving costs and energy for their future space explorations because they would be conducting all the operations in a very low gravity field over the moon. With an increasing number of countries planning to explore space in the near future, the Americans are more worried about the security of their own satellites. A permanent base on the moon would give them adequate facilities to secure their space-based assets.

Today, the Americans may not be directly interested in starting a new space race but they are making sure that they will remain in good form to enter one, if it ever starts.