President Bush announced Wednesday his goals for another manned moon landing and other space exploration, but university officials say that although this is important for science, they worry other NASA programs will suffer.
Bush's proposal laid out a timetable for a robotic mission to the moon by 2008, the first manned flight of a new spacecraft by 2014 and a manned lunar mission between 2015 and 2020.
Mark Voit, an associate professor of physics and astronomy and former employee at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said the moon's surface would be an ideal environment for research.
"There are certain types of radio telescopes we would like to build here on Earth, but wireless communication creates a lot of what we call 'noise,' and we can't observe the universe the ways we'd like to," he said. "One way to do that would be to build a telescope like that on the moon, where you wouldn't have that problem."
Expenses for Bush's space proposal are expected to be $12 billion over the next five years, with only $1 billion in new funds and the remainder reallocated from NASA's five-year budget. Future expenses are unknown.
Despite the benefits of moon research, university officials said the large amount of money for all proposed missions - expected to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars - will harm other NASA programs.
"My impression is, there is not remotely enough money in the budget for what he's set to do," astronomy professor Jack Baldwin said. "He's asking NASA to close down other programs."
Other programs should not suffer to gain more knowledge about the moon when there is much experimentation that can be done on Earth, astrophysics graduate student Chris Waters said.
"Even if they do learn a lot with this mission, whatever they are going to learn is a whole bunch about this one subject instead of spreading around money for a variety of projects," he said.
But English freshman Lauren Parker said the money will be well-spent.
"It's a good investment because discoveries there could lead to better things here, such as advances in technology and medicine," Parker said.
Another component of Bush's plan, the exploration of Mars, is already underway. At 5 a.m. Thursday, the Spirit rover rolled onto Mars for the first time since the landing two weeks ago. The rover's mission is to search for evidence of water having ever existed on the Red Planet.
"The voyage to Mars takes a long time and it hasn't been terribly successful," physics and astronomy professor Horace Smith said. "It's very exciting that this large rover has started rolling, and I think we can look forward to its mission and the future missions that will follow."
The Associated Press and staff writer Tina Reed contributed to this report.
