President Bush has given NASA a new mission: to return to the Moon and "to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own."  How realistic is the president's plan and his timetable?  Is it worth the money?  Should it have been more ambitious? Is NASA up to the task? For that matter, why should we send humans into space at all? The Ethics and Public Policy Center invited two distinguished commentators to analyze President Bush's new plans for NASA and to present their observations and reflections on these and other questions.

Dr. Robert Zubrin is among the foremost advocates of human space exploration. In the early 1990s, Dr. Zubrin developed for Lockheed Martin a plan to put humans on Mars within ten years. This plan, detailed in Dr. Zubrin's 1996 book The Case for Mars, would use Martian resources to make a mission to the Red Planet much more affordable than NASA had previously estimated. An aerospace engineer by profession, Dr. Zubrin is the president of the Mars Society, an international organization that supports the exploration and settlement of Mars.

Dr. Robert Park is a leading critic of manned spaceflight. Known for debunking bad science, Dr. Park argues that human space exploration is costly, dangerous and slow, when compared to robotic missions.  In his 2000 book, Voodoo Science, Dr. Park argues that telerobots are merely "extensions of our frail human bodies."  The scientists who control the telerobots, and see through their eyes, become virtual astronauts.  A physics professor at the University of Maryland, Dr. Park is also Director of Public Information in the Washington Office of the American Physical Society.

The debate was hosted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, under the aegis of its journal The New Atlantis, which focuses on the ethical, political, philosophical, and social implications of advancing technology. You can read more about the journal by visiting its Web page: www.TheNewAtlantis.com. An edited version of the debate between Drs. Park and Zubrin appears in the Winter 2004 issue:

• "The Right Plan," by Adam Keiper
• "The Virtual Astronaut," by Robert Park
• "The Human Explorer," by Robert Zubrin