Under a sweeping review of the US space programme, American astronauts will return to the Moon in the early part of the next decade, for the first time since the last Apollo landing in 1972.

The blueprint, which President Bush is expected to unveil on Wednesday, will establish a manned mission to Mars as the long-term goal of all American exploration of space, to inject vigour and vision into a programme that has been reeling since the Columbia disaster last February.

A permanent lunar space station is envisaged as a critical stepping stone to Mars, as it would test the technology needed to take astronauts to the Red Planet, to support them on arrival and get them safely home.

An attempt to land astronauts on Mars might follow within another decade, administration sources said.

The initiative has been widely interpreted as an attempt to provide the President with a “Kennedy moment” that unites the American people behind a great purpose in an election year. It has deliberate echoes of President Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to put a man on the Moon by the end of that decade, to counter the national humiliation of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space.

Many experts said yesterday that a more appropriate precedent was a speech made by the first President Bush in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, which also promised a return to the Moon and a manned flight to Mars. That project was abandoned after Nasa estimated the cost at $400billion (£220billion). The bill remains just as high today. Scientists and politicians said it was barely conceivable that the US Congress would approve such spending at a time when it wants to cut the huge budget deficits that are predicted for the next few years.

The International Space Station, which may be retired if a lunar base is built, will cost at least $100billion to complete, and much of any new investment will be eaten up by the development of a replacement for Nasa’s ageing shuttle fleet. Experts are also sceptical that the technical and human challenges of sending astronauts to Mars can be met before 2030 at the earliest.

Douglas Osheroff, a Nobel prize-winning physicist at Stanford University, who helped to investigate the Columbia disaster, said that money would be better spent on cheaper robotic missions, such as the Spirit rover that landed on Mars this week. “The cost of a manned enclave on the Moon, I think, is going to make the space station look cheap,” he said. “That’s the only good thing about it. I think we’re still 30 years from going to Mars, and if there’s any reason to do that, I don’t know.” Other scientists are worried that an overriding emphasis on manned missions would divert funds from other Nasa activities, which are more cost-effective and scientifically valuable.

Andrew Coates, of University College, London, said: “My big worry is whether the money for this will be drawn from elsewhere in the Nasa budget. It would be a disaster if this stops robotic missions to explore the Solar System.”

The new strategy has emerged from a review of US space policy supervised by Vice-President Dick Cheney since the loss of Columbia last year. Scott McClellan, the President’s press secretary, said: “The President ordered a comprehensive review of our space policy, including our priorities and the future of the programme; he will have more to say next week.”

Administration officials said that the speech was likely to be a broad “mission statement” rather than a detailed set of proposals.

The President is expected, however, to ask Congress to increase Nasa’s $15billion budget by $800million in 2005 and then to raise it by 5 per cent in each of the next five years.

The most probable timetable for flights to the Moon and Mars would see a “crew exploration vehicle” (CEV) capable of flying into low Earth orbit or to the Moon, developed to replace the shuttle. Unmanned prototypes could be tested as soon as 2007, with the three remaining shuttles retiring in 2010.

Nasa would then rely on Russian Soyuz and European Ariane-5 rockets to fly to the International Space Station, until the CEV was ready in 2013. Robotic probes and orbiters would continue to be sent to Mars in 2005, 2007 and 2009, and a “sample return” mission to collect Martian rocks for analysis might set off in 2011.

Moon landings would begin in about 2013, with a permanent base established in the second half of the next decade. Once the International Space Station is completed in 2013, the US would largely withdraw from the project to concentrate on the Moon and Mars. The lunar station would be used to research life-support and propulsion technology for a manned mission to Mars. The first Martian voyages would orbit the planet without landing, in similar fashion to the Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 moonshots that preceeded Apollo 11’s landing in 1969.

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