RZ:I don't know if it's necessary to unify them. The National Space Society is the most heterogeneous of these organizations and it is less focused, for instance, than the Planetary Society and the Mars Society. And this has actually impaired its ability to act effectively. I think that five thousand people who know what they want can accomplish more than twenty thousand people who don't.

I used to have a leading position in the National Space Society; the leading position, in fact. And after the Alan Hills meteorite was discovered and caused tremendous stir I was supportive of Mars exploration. I attempted to mobilize them behind this objective. And while some people were quite supportive, others were saying, well, you know, Bob, we understand you are from Mars, but what about the moon, what about L5 colonies, what about single-stage-to-orbit?

You know, we really don't want to focus on Mars. And if you can't focus, you can't accomplish things. So this has made it difficult to achieve very much and that is why I decided to shift my interest to a focused organization.

The Mars Society knows what it wants and, as a result, in our short amount of time - we've only existed since 1998 - we've accomplished more than all the other space organizations put together.

JO: To change question/subject slightly, NASA's currently publicly discussing privatizing the space shuttle. Is this a good thing?

RZ: I don't know. I'm not exactly sure what that means-privatizing the space shuttle. There's a lot of ways it could be done, I suppose, that might result in saving money for the taxpayers while allowing NASA to accomplish much more with its budget.

Or you could privatize things - airport security for example - and get inadequate results. The shuttle is a complex machine. It has to be properly supported. It has to be properly run, and it's obvious that there are certain cost savings that could be made and there are other cost savings that could be attempted that would be destructive. I'm not privy to the details of this plan and I can't really determine whether this is going to be a good or bad thing.

JO: Do you consider The International Space Station an asset or a burden for the governmental space exploration development strategy?

RZ: The Space Station, as itself, is both an asset and a burden. It offers certain technical capabilities that are of some value. I don't think they have as much value as the cost of the station. The real problem with the space station is that certain people have set it up as a toll gate.

That is, you cannot do anything else until the space station is completed, and yet, the Space Station Program has set itself up as a kind of entitlement that is meant to go on forever because the people that engineered the Space Station Program were primarily concerned with creating a program that would go for a long time and, thus be useful as a support for NASA's organizations to give them something to do for a long period of time.

That is unlike Apollo where we were results-oriented, where the idea was to get to the moon as quickly as possible to accomplish a particular objective.

The Space Station Program is really been organized as a maintenance program to maintain NASA as a force in being, which is also, of course, the purpose of the shuttle program. Now, maintaining NASA as a force in being has some merit provided you intend to do something with it afterwards.

I think that Richard Nixon and his people committed a massive crime when they basically shut down the Saturn V assembly lines and aborted NASA's plans to build moon bases in the 1970s and Mars missions in the 1980s.

Had they not done that - had they continued with the Apollo Program and its follow on that had been designed, humanity would be a multi-planet species right now. We would have the capability to send human missions anywhere in the inner solar system and it would be an incredible situation.

It was a massive disaster that was done. What they did, by shutting all that down, was put NASA on life support by giving it the Shuttle Program to maintain it as an organization with certain technical abilities, but not really doing anything.

I mean, it's done certain things, but not really if you compare it to what it was doing in the 1960s.

We have spent as much money on NASA between 1989 and today, for the past 12 years in inflation-adjusted dollars as we spent in NASA from 1961 to 1973.

Now 1961 to 1973 was the Apollo Era; in other words, the era that begins with the first human space flights-Alan Shepard, and Kennedy's speech in May of '61, running through the final Sky Lab missions, which were the Apollo sequel in 1973. Now what did NASA do in that period?

Well, let's see.

• They developed multi-stage, heavy lift launch vehicles.
• They developed the capability for interplanetary communication and life support systems.
• They developed the re-entry systems for capsules.
• They developed the ability to do soft landings on the moon.
• They developed lunar rovers.
• They flew the Mercury missions, the Gemini missions, the Apollo missions, six human missions to the moon.
• They flew 40 lunar and planetary probes reaching in this period from zero capability to not only exploring the moon, but sending probes to Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter.
• And they did all the technical work required for the Voyager mission that subsequently went as far as Neptune.
• Then during this time they developed Kennedy Space Center, Johnson Space Center, Jet Propulsion Lab, as the centers as we know them today.

What has NASA done between 1989 and today?

Well,..

• they launched and repaired the Hubble Space Telescope.
• They flew about eight planetary missions.
• They launched the beginning of the space station.

And yet we've spent the same amount of money. And the reason is that you cannot have progress without a goal. In the 1960s NASA had a great goal that made its reach exceed its grasp.

And so it did. And it expanded its reach and it expanded our reach and created-together with certain military spending that was done in the same period-pretty much all the space technologies that we have today. By comparison, the 1990s have been completely unproductive-no goal, no progress.