Washington, Feb 02: Even as Nasa mourns the crew of shuttle Columbia, the space agency is asking the american people for enough money to take aim at the moon and Mars too.

One year after Columbia's fatal February 1, 2003, break-up over Texas, Nasa officials have prepared a budget request for 16.2 billion dollar for fiscal 2005, a 5.6 per cent increase over the previous year, meant to lay the groundwork for sending Americans back to the moon by 2020 and eventually on to Mars.
The Bush administration's proposed budget is set for release today, but Nasa chief Sean o'Keefe will not be part of the administration's push to explain it today. Instead, he is to attend a memorial for the seven Columbia astronauts at Arlington national cemetery.
O'Keefe has already set an annual day of remembrance for fallen astronauts, the last Thursday in January, and other memorials were scheduled for Texas, Florida and elsewhere.
Far from wanting to shut the door on the Columbia disaster, o'Keefe said he wanted to keep the lessons of the tragedy in the collective mind at Nasa as the agency regroups to realise ''the President's vision for US Space exploration''.
This grand sense of mission, articulated by President George W Bush on January 14, had been missing from Nasa since the demise of the Soviet Union, according to outside experts who investigated the underlying causes of the Columbia disaster.
''The end of the Cold War in the late 1980s meant that the most important political underpinning of Nasa's human space flight program, the US -Soviet space competition, was lost, with no strong political objective to replace it,'' the authors of the Columbia accident investigation board report wrote.
Bureau Report