The final frontier

When Dave Beaty tells children about NASA's plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2020 - and to Mars, perhaps as early as 2030 - he almost always gets the same response. Troy Anderson in the Daily News.

"When I go into kindergarten classrooms and ask students, `How many of you want to be the first person on Mars?' all their hands go up," said Beaty, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

"I think it's a great frontier. It's something humans have never done before. The people who do it will be regarded as heroes ... These people will get engraved in history."