Let's forget Nasa's fancy ideas

It is more than 35 years since Harrison Schmidt and Eugene Cernan, the last men on the Moon, returned to Earth. The Apollo programme now seems a remote historical episode: children all over the world learn that America landed men on the Moon, just as they learn that the Egyptians built the Pyramids; but the motivations seem almost as bizarre in the one case as in the other.

The recent film In the Shadow of the Moon depicted these historic - indeed heroic - events, but to today's young audiences the outdated gadgetry and the “right stuff” values seemed almost as antiquated as a traditional Western. Manned spaceflight has never recovered the same glamour - understandably so, because it hardly seems inspiring, nearly 40 years after the Apollo lunar landings, for astronauts merely to circle the Earth in the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. Ironically, it is only when disaster has struck, as it has twice in more than 100 launches, that the shuttle has made real headlines.

The burgeoning scientific, environmental, commercial and military applications of space have not needed manned spaceflight, but have benefited from the technical advances - unimagined in the 1970s - that have given us mobile phones and the internet. Close-ups of the Martian surface and of Jupiter's moons, and cosmic images from the Hubble telescope, received more media coverage than routine shuttle flights. We depend on space technology for communications, weather forecasting, mapping, position-finding and so forth - quite apart from the science it has given us.

Just this week, astronauts are installing the European-built “Columbus module” - a laboratory for scientific experiments - on the space station. This is in itself good news, but it is the end of a prolonged and unsatisfactory saga. This laboratory was conceived in the early 1980s; it was named in the hope that it would be launched on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage. It is therefore 16 years late, and few regard this as good value for money. Without a redefined mission the space station, even when completed, will remain a turkey in the sky.

It is claimed by Nasa that tens of billions more dollars must be spent to finish the space station, in order to keep faith with the foreign partners who have built parts of it. However, whatever their public rhetoric, most European scientists regret having got involved; they could all have been contentedly paid off far more cheaply than it will cost the Americans to finish the space station. Indeed, I think the real, albeit undeclared, reason for persisting with the project is that, were the US to abandon it, the Russians would then take full possession of the “high ground” - and to the Americans that would be a massive indignity. And there is now a challenge from the Chinese, who may be the next nation to land a man on the Moon.

President Bush has proposed a long-term programme to return to the Moon, establish a manned base there and then go to Mars. Were I an American taxpayer, I would be opposed to this: if it is done Nasa-style, it will be hugely expensive and vulnerable to delays and political setbacks. I hope, nonetheless, that some people now living will walk on Mars - though they will be adventurers, perhaps sponsored privately or commercially, accepting extreme cost-cutting and much higher risks than it is politically acceptable for Nasa to impose on publicly funded civilian astronauts.

As a European, I believe we should learn a lesson from the space station, and limit our collaboration with Nasa to “bite-sized” unmanned projects; we should be wary of committing ourselves, as an inevitably “minor partner”, to a hugely expensive manned programme.

In economic and intellectual firepower, Europe is fully a match for the US. But the activities of Europe's Space Agency (ESA), though successful and generally cost-effective, have been more modest: America's activities in space were ramped up to a higher level because of superpower rivalry during the Cold War. But most of Nasa's large budget is spent on the Shuttle and the space station, and will thereafter be committed to further manned projects. If we in Europe eschewed manned spaceflight (unless tickets became very cheap) and concentrated our expenditure on space robotics, fabrication and miniaturisation, we could gain an ascendancy over the US in all those aspects of space that are of greatest practical value, as well as of greatest scientific interest.

Even by European standards, space has not figured highly in our national priorities: France has been far more committed. However, we have achieved successes in space science, and in important niche markets as well - for instance, the University of Surrey's commercial microsatellites. But it is now time for the UK, which has been a minor player even within Europe, to raise its game.

Everyone has heard of Nasa, many have heard of ESA, but few have heard of BNSC (the British National Space Centre). That is why the Royal Society has urged a higher-profile UK space agency so that we can seek cost-effective collaborations with India, China and the US, as well as within Europe, and promote and develop our nation's success in the cost-effective use of space, and the associated “cutting-edge” technologies.

Today the Government publishes a new strategy for space. This is an opportunity to increase our leverage in high-tech developments that are becoming ever more pervasive in our lives - and to recover some of the inspiration of the open frontier.

Martin Rees. Lord Rees of Ludlow is Astronomer Royal and president of the Royal Society.