A large group of former NASA managers and planetary scientists is proposing sweeping changes to the Bush Administration's Vision for Space Exploration that would replace a human return to the Moon with manned missions to asteroids and other locations much farther from Earth.

Building on a February workshop at Stanford University, the group is urging the incoming presidential team to adopt the alternative goals as a new Obama Vision for Space Exploration. Some potential candidates to be Obama's NASA administrator helped lead the definition of the alternative goals.

"Unfortunately, NASA's implementation of the [Bush] Vision has been focused no farther than the Moon, a destination the United States first reached nearly 40 years ago," says the new proposal, compiled by the Planetary Society and a group of participants in the Stanford workshop. "Though not precluding a return to the Moon in concert with international partners, the incoming administration should consider an alternative plan that makes demonstrable progress toward new destinations and new achievements in a flexible, affordable manner," the group stated in a report released in Washington Nov. 13.

The revised vision would include more international participation up front, as well as much greater emphasis on Earth environmental monitoring coupled with deep space exploration.

The primary objective of the new proposal is to use the new Ares-booster/Orion-spacecraft infrastructure to begin missions venturing further from Earth earlier, with the goal of achieving manned Mars missions sooner than the 2030s as envisioned by the Bush plan.

"Although the Bush Vision for Space Exploration articulated important new directions, their implementation has been flawed and inadequately funded," says the new proposal. "There is risk that the mistakes that have hindered space exploration since the time of Apollo could be repeated."

One potential driver for early lunar missions has been the theory that water frozen in permanently dark areas near the Moon's poles could provide experience on extraction and utilization by humans. The jury is still out on lunar water, but high-resolution data from Japan's Selene lunar orbiter indicate there is little or no frozen water in the Shackleton Crater at the lunar South Pole where scientists had hoped to find it.

India's new lunar orbiter is also searching for water ice on the Moon, as will the U.S. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter planned for launch in April 2009. On Mars, however, NASA's Phoenix lander already has found a sea of water ice just inches below the surface at northern latitudes.

Numerous planetary managers say they fear a manned Moon base and even shorter sorties to the Moon will leave the U.S. space program "moonstuck" -- bogged down just as the space shuttle and International Space Station have prevented the U.S. manned program from going anywhere but Earth orbit.

As the Stanford proposal was being formulated, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin argued that "interest in the Moon is driven by goals in addition to, and beyond the requirements of the science community.