Excerpts from The Space Science Enterprise Strategic Plan: Origins, Evolution, and Destiny of the Cosmos and Life

Originally published in 1997; reprinted from Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, Volume V: Exploring the Cosmos, published in 2001; also available at NASA (Web site)

On August 7, 1996, the U.S. space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, made an historic announcement: Scientists from the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and from Stanford University in California had found evidence of life on the planet Mars. They made this discovery after analyzing a meteorite (the solid...