WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush announced plans on Wednesday to send humans back to the moon as early as 2015 and eventually to Mars "an election-year initiative that critics derided as a costly extravagance that could renew a military space race.

"We will build new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon and prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own,"Bush said at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The announcement came less than a year after the re-entry breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, which killed all seven astronauts last February. Bush said the remaining space shuttles would be retired in 2010.

The new initiative would be "a journey, not a race,"Bush said, and he called on other nations to join the US effort.

Alice Slater, head of the environmentalist advocacy group Global Resource Action Centre for the Environment, warned that the Bush initiative "will create a new arms race to the heavens."

US security officials have said military dominance in space was essential. NASA's 2003 strategic plan says the agency's mission was widened to include the Pentagon's space effort.

The announcement was the latest ambitious policy initiative designed to portray Bush as a leader who deserves re-election in November. The president has sought to avoid the fate of his father, former President George Bush, who was defeated for re-election in 1992 by Bill Clinton.

The elder Bush also proposed sending humans back to the moon and on to Mars in 1989, but that proposal went nowhere.

Bush proposed landing an unmanned spacecraft on the moon as early as 2008. Humans would return to the moon by 2020, after an absence since December 1972. The moon would serve as a stepping stone to an eventual manned mission to Mars.

(China Daily 01/16/2004 page1)