NASA awaits Saturday landing of Mars probe

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will gather at computer monitors late Saturday, waiting for signals that an air bag- encased probe has bounced safely onto Mars. Then it will be time for a machine they sent 300 million miles to get down to work.

The first of two golf-cart-sized rovers, Spirit, should land about 8:35 p.m. California time on Jan. 3. After nine days of tests, the vehicle will venture to the center of Gusev Crater, a bowl about as big as Connecticut that may have held a lake, to seek evidence of an environment that might have nurtured life. Opportunity, a sibling rover, is on course to reach the red planet three weeks later.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is devoting a growing share of its budget to robotic missions as officials rebuild the agency's manned program following the Columbia shuttle disaster in February. Mars alone claims about $600 million of the annual allocation of at least $15 billion for the next four years. Spending on solar-system exploration is projected to rise 47 percent to $2 billion a year by 2008.

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean said in an interview that while he would be "sweating now" were he managing the rover missions, because of past Mars exploration failures, the robotic prospectors are "going to whet the appetite, in particular if they make any kind of unusual discoveries."

Boeing, Lockheed

The loss of Columbia and its crew of seven means the agency that built its name on feats such as the Apollo moon landings is counting on robots to rekindle interest in exploration. Contractors such as Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., and suppliers including ILC Dover and Ball Corp., stand to benefit.

Boeing and Lockheed, through their United Space Alliance venture, are NASA's main contractors. They will be the most obvious beneficiaries of more robotics work, said John Douglass, president of the Aerospace Industries Association, a Washington- based trade group for more than 200 companies.

Scores of smaller contractors may also gain, from the California Institute of Technology, which operates the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA, to closely held ILC Dover of Dover, Delaware, which made air bags to cushion the Mars landings. Beer-can maker Ball's aerospace unit built cameras and antennas for the rovers, whose missions are costing about $800 million.

"Obviously, companies that are in the space business are going to prosper under that regime," Douglass said in an interview.