Washington, Jan 16: After announcing his ambitious plans to send manned missions to the moon and mars, US President George W Bush has been brought back down to earth by doubts about how such a monumental project can be financed.

Bush called late Wednesday for a new space vessel capable of traveling to the moon as early as 2015. But in terms of financing, the space agency will have only an additional billion dollars at its disposal over five years, in addition to its annual budget of 15.4 billion dollars.
Traveling to Mars "is expensive and risky. The United States may not spend the money this will take, or people may lose interest" in the program, warned James Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Peter Wilson, a space exploration policy expert at the Rand Corporation, conceded that it "will require a huge effort by the administration to mobilize the public opinion over this. It's a 20-to-30-year program, not a crash program like Apollo, that took only 10 years."
As if attempting to demonstrate the feasibility of Bush's dream, the US robot Spirit made its first steps on Mars overnight Wednesday. But the two-robot rover mission, expected to continue for three months on the Red Planet, cost just 820 million dollars.
Bureau Report