A Case of Space Fever; Why should wheeled robots on Mars have all the fun?(Charles Elachi, National Aeronautics Space Administration, Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Byline: Adam Piore and Eric Pape, With Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi and Mike Kepp in Rio de Janeiro

You'd be hard-pressed to find much similarity between Charles Elachi's carpeted office in modern-day Pasadena, California, and the treacherous frontier where explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark blazed their famous trail 200 years ago. But the bespectacled director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory--the scientist in charge of the Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit--can't help but feel a kinship of sorts with the two tobacco-chewing American folk heroes. Elachi has spent recent days in a mission-control room monitoring landscapes and strange rock formations never before seen or recorded by mankind. "We feel like we are on cloud nine," he says.

Elachi isn't the only one with space fever. Not since the heyday of the cold war has so much attention been focused on the possibilities for human exploration of space. Last October, China became the third nation to send an astronaut into orbit and announced plans to land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon by 2010. U.S. President George W. Bush followed in January with a call for a new manned mission to the moon by 2020 that would blaze the way to Mars. The European Space Agency weighed in earlier this month, reiterating plans to land on a comet in 2014 and possibly send a human to Mars by 2033. In the wake of China's space mission, Japan, too, announced it is considering a moon mission. NASA now has 17 spacecraft trolling the solar system--more than at any time in its history. Could it be that space exploration is once again moving to the top of the global agenda?

If so, blame it on the scientists, evil or not. Their plot to manipulate world leaders into signing on for the moon and Mars began at least as far back as the late 1980s. Life was being discovered in the most inhospitable places--frozen in polar ice, buried in aquifers and huddled at the mouth of deep-ocean hydrothermal vents. "Suddenly we realized life was far more ubiquitous on Earth than we ever expected," says Franco Ongaro, the man who coordinated ESA's efforts to explore the solar system. That led many scientists to wonder anew if life existed elsewhere in the solar system. In 1996, researchers analyzed an Antarctic meteorite--a bit of Mars that broke off and fell to Earth long ago--and found what looked like the fossils of Martian ...