President Bush, in his big space policy announcement on Wednesday, will call for replacing aging U.S. space shuttles with a new generation spacecraft to get Americans back to the moon and on to Mars, officials said on Saturday. Seeking to give NASA a new mission a year after the shuttle Columbia tragedy and to provide a space vision for his re-election campaign, Bush will set a goal of returning to the moon by the middle of the next decade and establishing a human presence there as a stepping stone to an eventual manned mission to Mars. Bush will urge Congress to approve development of a new capsule-type spacecraft, called a crew exploration vehicle, capable of performing a variety of missions, including trips to the moon and the International Space Station, officials said. It would be launched using conventional rockets much like the Apollo capsules of the 1960s and 1970s and would have an escape system that the shuttle does not have. The new spacecraft would replace a planned orbital space plane that had been expected to follow the space shuttle.

The United States no longer has a rocket powerful enough to launch an Apollo-style moon mission. And although the Saturn 5 moon rocket was developed in just five years, it was dropped from production three years after Neil Armstrong's first moon landing in 1969.

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