Space advocates talk about evaluating U.S. "vision"

Washington correspondent Eun Kim filed this report ...

NASA should speed up its work on sending humans to Mars and will need to work with global partners to get that task done, a group of scientists and space advocates said today.

The group also pushed for the next president to properly fund the agency, saying NASA has been asked "to do more with less" for nearly two decades.

After meeting behind closed doors for the past two days at Stanford University, a group of scientists, space policy experts and exploration advocates issued a statement today expressing their hope Americans can use a trip to Mars as a stepping stone to destinations even farther away.

An outpost on Mars "is the driver that makes human exploration worth the cost and the risk associated with it," Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, said in a conference call to talk about the group's meeting.

"Mars is the only planet we know of with accessible oxygen, accessible water," he said. "It's not an absolute certainty that we will go someday and settle or colonize Mars, but it certainly is the only world we know of that we can do that on."

But to speed up NASA's plan to head to Mars, as well as various Earth science programs the agency runs, federal lawmakers must first restore NASA's coffers.

The group estimated the agency needs an additional $3 billion in funding over the next few years to make up for compounded budget cuts.

The group stressed that their emphasis on Mars did not diminish the importance of plans for Americans to return to the moon by 2020. It also said that most of the conclusions emerging from the meeting was intended for the nation’s next president, rather than the current agency leadership.

"I'm very puzzled as why this is being perceived as a critique instead of an affirmation of what NASA is actually doing," said Kathryn Thornton, a former NASA astronaut now with the University of Virginia's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.