Russians propose international project to put man on Mars

MOSCOW -- Russian space officials have proposed an ambitious project to send a six-person team to Mars around the year 2015, a trip that would mark a milestone in space travel and international cooperation.

Russia's space program hopes to work closely with NASA and the European Space Agency to build two spaceships capable of taking a crew to Mars, supporting them on the planet for up to two months and safely bringing them home, said Nikolai Anfimov, head of the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building.

The roughly 440-day trip is expected to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent.

"It must be an international project," said Vitaly Semyonov, head of the Mars project at the M.V. Keldysha Space Research Center. "No one country could cope alone with this task."

Russian space officials said they are receiving encouraging signs of interest from NASA and European counterparts.

But NASA officials have not mentioned any such project and could not immediately be reached for comment. Because of demands from Congress to scale back costs, human travel to Mars has not been on NASA's radar recently.

"We are still very far away," conceded Alain Fournier-Sicre, head of the European Space Agency's permanent mission in Russia. "But this kind of program is a long-term initiative."

A 'Mars curse'

Landing humans on Mars has long been a dream of Russian space scientists. But even in the heyday of the Soviet space program, when Moscow reported success after success, its attempts to reach the Red Planet were marked by failure. Soviet scientists began whispering about a "Mars curse."

The Soviet Union kicked off Mars exploration in 1960 by launching two unmanned spacecraft four days apart. Both failed even to make it as far as Earth's orbit. One resulted in an engine explosion that scattered debris and contamination over the Baikonur launch pad in one of the worst accidents in Soviet space history.

That was followed by repeated attempts and often repeated disappointment. The bad luck for Russia continued on Nov. 16, 1996, when the Russians launched an ambitious $300 million spacecraft, Mars 96. They hoped it would prove that despite economic struggles after the Soviet breakup, they could still run a first-rate space program. Mars 96 suffered an engine failure just after launch and crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

Anfimov said that despite the setbacks, "we never stopped planning and seeking opportunities to reach our next goal: Mars."

NASA's Mars program, plagued by its own series of setbacks, got back on track earlier this year when the unmanned Mars Odyssey spacecraft entered orbit around the planet and began mapping the mineral and chemical makeup of the surface.