Bush Likely to Support Mission to Mars

WASHINGTON —  President Bush, caught between the need to restrain federal spending and a desire to back his vice president, is likely to endorse a proposal for a Mars space mission championed by Dan Quayle, but he will avoid adopting a detailed timetable for it in a speech today, White House officials said Wednesday.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, backed by the National Space Council that Quayle heads, has called for a Mars mission as a way of reinvigorating the long-stalled manned space program. Other Bush advisers, though, are deeply concerned about the plan’s potentially huge cost.

Cost Concerns

Given the Administration’s emphasis on reducing the federal deficit, Bush is “really concerned that he doesn’t write checks with his mouth that he can’t cash,” one key aide said. “He really wants to be credible.”

Bush plans to give what aides are describing as a major speech on space policy this morning, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Apollo landing on the Moon. Afterward, he will host a barbecue lunch for Apollo astronauts at the White House.

Chief Policy Assignment

The space issue poses both a budgetary and a political problem for the President. The space council has been the chief domestic policy assignment given to Quayle, the first step in the Administration’s plan to slowly build his image, which was badly battered during the fall campaign.

Earlier this month, shortly before Bush left for the recent economic summit in Europe, the council forwarded him a list of recommendations on space policy. The recommendations supported NASA’s Mars plan, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Wednesday.

Target of Criticism

Bush would like to give Quayle a public vote of confidence, particularly because the vice president is once again being derided, this time by senior Republican officials quoted in a new book about the campaign. The book, by veteran political reporters Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, has caused a furor in GOP circles by quoting former Bush and Quayle campaign aides as making disparaging remarks about Quayle’s intelligence and political acumen.

In addition to the political benefits for Quayle, spending for space is popular among groups that have been politically important to Bush, including the Southern California aerospace industry and voters in Florida and Bush’s home base of Houston, where major NASA facilities are located.

Cost ‘Very High’

At the same time, Fitzwater said Wednesday, the cost of Quayle’s recommendation is “very high.” Bush has asked Congress to give NASA $13.3 billion next year--roughly 1% of the federal budget--and the Senate has been cutting that request in the past several days. A Mars mission, NASA officials estimate, would require doubling or tripling the agency’s budget.

The speech is likely to be in marked contrast with the famous address to a joint session of Congress that President John F. Kennedy used to launch the U.S. manned space program in 1961, and the contrast underlines how much the attitude toward federal spending has changed in the face of the huge and persistent deficits of the last eight years.

Kennedy, in the 1961 speech, made a point of emphasizing the “very heavy costs” that landing a man on the Moon would entail and declared that if the nation was not ready to commit itself to a firm timetable and raise the necessary funds, “in my judgment it would be better not to go at all.”

Bush, by contrast, is likely to endorse the general idea of a Mars landing sometime in the next century, along with intermediate steps, including a manned space station and a permanent Moon base that would be used to launch an eventual Mars mission, aides said. But he is likely to avoid any firm timetable, thereby sidestepping the difficult issue of where to find the money.

Staff writer John M. Broder contributed to this story.