Before I start I would like to remind everyone that today is the 40^th anniversary of America’s first space flight; that of Al Shepard, who made a sub-orbital hop of 15 minutes.

Three weeks after Shepard’s flight, President John F Kennedy travelled over to the Capitol Building to give a speech on "Urgent National Needs". One part of this speech has become immortal:

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish".

In spite of the severe doubts by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) whether it could be achieved, President Kennedy’s goal was achieved 2978 days later on 20 July 1969.

During the euphoria following the flight and touchdown of Apollo 11, then-President Richard Nixon commissioned Vice President Spiro Agnew to head a Task Force to determine what direction the US space program should take during the 1970s and 1980s.

In September 1969, the Task Force presented their Report to the President. Instead of taking immediate action, it lay unattended on his desk for four months.

The Report contained some interesting possible future directions for the US space program in the form of three options:

The first option was a rapid program similar to Apollo that would have put men on Mars by 1983 and would have required the funding of nine billion dollars per year from 1980 onwards. The final decision for that option would need to be made by 1974.

The second option was to fund a human Mars expedition to leave Earth in 1986. This would cost eight billion dollars a year from 1980 onwards and would require a final decision by 1977.

The third and final option would defer a Mars flight until the year 2000, with a decision to be made by 1980.

One of the main elements in these plans would be the development of a reusable space vehicle that would make "routine" flights to an Earth orbiting space station. Another requirement would be the development of a rocket powerful enough to send people to Mars. A team headed by Wernher von Braun had envisioned a rocket engine named "Nerva" which would be nuclear-powered and would provide sufficient thrust for both a shuttle and Mars vehicle.

These plans came to a crashing halt in 1970, when Nixon rejected his Task Force’s report. At the same time, NASA’s budget was slashed and the last three manned lunar landings were cancelled.

The only remainder of the Task Force was the "go ahead" to build a space shuttle, which would, in the words of Richard Nixon, "bring the price of going into space, down to earth".

Originally, the space shuttle was planned to launch from the late 1970s on a weekly basis, and would be the USA’s main route into space for the rest of the century. As history has shown, the shuttle has turned into an expensive, unreliable and (in the case of the "Challenger" accident in January 1986) a deadly vehicle.

Now we come to the reality of space flight in the year 2001, in which it was once predicted that any human could go to space as if they were travelling on an aircraft, the Moon and Mars would be settled by humans and travel out of the Solar System would be a reality.

Firstly, as I have said, the space shuttle has never lived up to its potential. To send someone up on the shuttle costs approximately US$10,000 per pound, and the shuttle has never left Earth orbit. It has been useful in several cases, such as the deployment and constant servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope, the deployment of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and launching the Ulysses probe to the Sun. It also deployed the Galileo probe to Jupiter.

A human on Mars is still a dream. The only Mars exploration being done at present is by the robot Mars Global Surveyor. Out of the last six NASA robot probes sent to Mars, only two have made it there in one piece, and we can only hope that the Mars 2001 Odyssey, which was recently launched, will get there in October.

There is now an International Space Station, which was originally suggested in 1984 – the first element did not go into space until 1998 and it will not be completed until 2006-2007 at a cost of two hundred billion dollars. Again, it is strictly a low-Earth-orbit spacecraft.

The Russian space program, which was once the world’s best, is now down to a budget of $150 million per year, and has been reduced to an agency that takes paying tourists up to the International Space Station – this despite the vehement objections of the ISS partners, comprising the USA, Canada, Japan, Brazil and the 16 countries of the European Space Agency.

As for NASA, no US President has paid serious attention to the agency since John F Kennedy. The problematic space shuttle is symbolic of the current lack of plans for humans beyond low-Earth-orbit.

I would like to close with a segment from Ray Bradbury’s "Martian Chronicles", written shortly after World War 2 and featuring colonists on Mars: