Officials: Focus on moon travels could harm NASA
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.