The Price of Mars

Moments before Apollo 11 's booster lifted off from Cape Kennedy last July, Spiro Agnew declared that the nation's next major space goal should be a manned landing on Mars by the end of the century. Critics immediately retorted that the Vice President's extraterrestrial ambitions were outrunning the nation's means. Last week the President's task group on post-Apollo space objectives --which Agnew happens to head--made its chairman sound uncharacteristically cautious. It said that the U.S. could send men to Mars in the mid-1980s for not much more than the $24 billion Apollo program.

In a report to President Nixon on future U.S. space policy, the four-member Agnew panel* fully endorsed the Mars goal but offered three timetables with varying price tags. The options:

> If Congress is willing to spend from $8 billion to $10 , billion a year on space by the end of the 1970s, the U.S. can reach the red planet as early as 1983.

> If Congress holds NASA's budget under the $6 billion-a-year peak reached in 1966 for the Apollo project, the Mars landing will not take place until after 1990.

> If Congress compromises on a maximum NASA budget of $7.65 billion by 1980, the Martian touchdown can be achieved in 1986.

Agnew openly backed the middle course, which Nixon himself is likely to accept. Its principal advantage is that it does not require a dramatic increase in the space budget at a time when the nation is under pressure to meet serious social needs. Moreover, it will allow the President to defer a firm commitment to go to Mars until 1976, or the last year of what might be a second Nixon term, without hurting chances of making the 1986 target date.

Whenever the landing, the Mars expedition will be vastly different from the voyages to the moon. Unlike Apollo's nonreturn booster and lunar module, the vehicles that take men to Mars will be used on many voyages. "When a vehicle returns from Mars to earth orbit," said NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine, "it will be left in earth orbit. After refueling, resupply, and providing a new crew, the vehicle would be ready to go again--back to Mars, to Venus, or on a shuttle run to the moon."

*Consisting of Agnew, NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine, Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans and Presidential Science Adviser Lee DuBridge.

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