Future astronauts must travel light and fast if they are to explore the moon and Mars, NASA visionaries predicted Tuesday. That could mean human explorers will board nuclear-powered rockets for their deep- space destinations and, when they arrive, unpack an inflatable habitation module that’s equipped with machinery to recycle air and water. “These are difficult missions, but they are things we can do if we make the right investments,” said NASA’s Gary Martin, who was recently named the agency’s first space architect. “You have to start investing in the technologies.”

A far-reaching space exploration initiative, previewed on Sunday by an international aerospace organization, would launch humans to Mars by 2050. Still in development, the proposal from the Paris-based International Academy of Astronautics seeks to rekindle the legacy of NASA’s Apollo lunar missions by initiating the migration of human explorers throughout the solar system. “We lost it after we went to the moon; we didn’t go to Mars. We recalled the fleet and huddled close to the Earth,” said Wesley Huntress, a planetary geologist from the Carnegie Institution of Washington who outlined the strategy to the World Space Congress.

As a group of people attentively listened to his disembodied voice, renowned science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke lamented the progress the world has made in its exploration of space. “We’re lucky to get to Mars in 2020,” Clarke said via telephone during an event Monday commemorating the 40th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s speech at Rice University where he set forth his goal of landing on the moon.

Without including a price tag for his initiative, a Texas congressman filed legislation Wednesday that would set NASA on a course to reach Mars with human explorers within 20 years. U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, a Beaumont Democrat whose legislative district includes NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said his bill, “The Space Exploration Act of 2002,” is intended to give new focus to the financially troubled U.S. space program. Lampson’s bill would establish a new office of exploration within NASA funded at $50 million in 2003 and $200 million in 2004. But the lawmaker does not attempt to calculate how much it would cost to send human explorers to Mars. He leaves that task to the experts who would staff NASA’s new exploration organization.

As explorers venture farther from Earth and stay longer in the international space station, they will need to grow their own fresh veggies and learn how to be high-tech farmers in zero gravity. Growing food in the starkness of space is a challenge that researchers from the University of Florida and NASA will tackle at a new Center for Space Agricultural Biotechnology Research and Education, or SABRE, to be unveiled Monday at the Kennedy Space Center in Brevard County. “It’s all about biology in space, and plants in particular,” said Mike Martin, UF vice president for agriculture and natural resources. “We’ve got to figure out how to grow food on the way to Mars.”

China is working on prototypes of space rockets that will bring it closer to its long cherished dream of putting a man into space, the China Daily newspaper said on Thursday. A preliminary study on the rockets, aimed at stepping up China’s space program and international satellite services, has ended and efforts have shifted to the research and manufacturing of prototypes, it said. The new rockets, to be powered by liquid hydrogen, would bring the launch capacity of Chinese rockets closer in line with technology used elsewhere, it said. “The new rockets can be used to send large-scale astronomical telescopes and explorers to the moon and Mars,” the paper said.