Project Constellation, as it is called, will embody the agency's latest reach for the stars and officials have begun by trying to speed up the normally slow-paced process of defining spaceship designs and issuing contracts to create them.

According to the head of the new NASA office in charge of fulfilling Bush's space vision, Project Constellation may set a lightning pace for the space plan's developmental and testing phases.

"We're trying to do business differently," said retired Rear Adm. Craig E. Steidle, who was named the day after the president's announcement to become NASA's associate administrator and head of its Office of Exploration Systems. Steidle had precious little time to get acclimated to his job after years in the Pentagon, where he directed the Joint Strike Fighter project. His new NASA job has been created from scratch.

The task before Steidle and his team is a multi-pronged effort to get the first requests out to industry on how to develop the Constellation spaceships, called crew exploration vehicles.

The CEVs will be built in slightly different versions, like different models of the same automobile. Some of the craft will have the capability of docking with the International Space Station, now under orbital assembly. Other versions will feature hardware allowing them to serve as bases of operations on the moon's surface. Still other variants will be capable of leaving the Earth-moon system behind and head out to the asteroids or Mars, or possibly more distant destinations.

Although all such machines may exhibit the same shape, under their heat shield skins they could prove to be very different craft -- some even bigger, some smaller.

What forms the ships will take -- their shapes and sizes and weights -- are up to industry to define. Steidle has sketched only the broadest outlines to guide space designers as they operate under the first paying contracts to conduct detailed design studies this summer and fall.

The process of defining the new craft began late last month, when NASA sent out a Request for Information to the aerospace industry that contained 39 different elements. The document basically asked leaders in the space field what they thought about, among other items:

- - how NASA should proceed with designing the Constellation ships;

- - what issues should be identified early, and

- - what capabilities individual companies possess that might be utilized in the new space program.

Based on these responses, Steidle said, NASA is developing 15 White Papers -- a series of in-depth trade studies that would give detailed attention to each element of the Bush space plan -- moonships, Mars craft, new space boosters, advanced robots, new power technologies to run bases on the moon and expeditions out into deeper space venues.

Six of the trade studies address ways to lift the Constellation components into orbit.

"I have a stack this high," Steidle said of the studies compiled thus far, gesturing to the height of his waist. The next step, after assimilating these studies, will be to issue a series of so-called Broad Area Announcements, beginning next month, which break down three elements of the Constellation CEVs for detailed study -- an orbital version, a lunar version and technology maturation.

NASA will proceed with spacecraft design and construction using a management process called spiral development. Created originally to advanced new software designs, the process incorporates new technologies or capabilities into a system more quickly than other management methods, then brings the whole system to operational readiness while still refining its capabilities. Engineers say it is a way to update system design even as development continues.

NASA officials will employ spiral development -- in a phase called Spiral 1 -- to create the first generation of crew exploration vehicles, capable of carrying astronauts only into Earth orbit. According to Capt. Michael Hecker, the agency's deputy administrator for development programs in the Office of Exploration, the objective is to send the first crewed CEVs into space no later than 2014, preceded by unpiloted flight tests in 2011 and the first test flight of a stripped-down prototype as early as 2008.

Hecker said NASA would choose two contractors and each would attempt to bring a prototype CEV -- along with a separate booster rocket -- into space by 2008.

"This is not a flyoff," Hecker cautioned, because the test versions would contain only about 30 percent of the systems of a fully developed craft.

"The purpose of these demonstrations is risk reductions," added Garry Lyles, deputy division director for Constellation. "We'll use the results of the 2008 demonstrations to help us in the source selection of the CEV."

At the end of that development cycle, the resulting design would fold into Spiral 2, a moon-bound CEV fully capable of supporting astronauts on a trip from Earth orbit to the moon and down to live on its surface. Another Spiral, not yet fixed on the development calendar, would involve building a CEV capable of interplanetary flights to Mars and beyond.

Each of the Broad Area Announcements would lead to study contracts valued at $6 million each -- a $3 million base agreement with a $3 million set of options. Three such BAA studies are planned -- one to address the whole CEV concept; another to study advanced science needs, and a third to assess a development path to mature the technology the Constellation project would require.

When done, all of the study results would shape NASA's Request for Proposals for the spaceships themselves, to be issued next year. The RFPs would include design of the rocket that would carry the CEVs. According to Lyles, NASA would place special emphasis on CEVs with system and subsystem components that are common to their Mars-bound future versions. He added that both the crewed rocket and the cargo version should have maximum common elements and compatibility as well.

Together with their industry partners, NASA also will attempt to identify equipment and systems that astronauts will need to live and work on other worlds. First and foremost will be new atomic powerplants that can provide light, heat and electricity, both to a moon or Mars base or to an interplanetary spaceship.

NASA personnel and contractors are studying new types of tools, spacesuits and roving vehicles, along with when to introduce each new technology and how to flight test it. They are giving advanced robotics detailed review. Goddard Spaceflight Center near Greenbelt, Md., is in charge of developing the first lunar robotic probes -- which Steidle said would be launched into moon orbit in 2008, and make their first landings on the surface between 2009 and 2010, well in advance of their human counterparts.

Based on these developments, by this fall, NASA and the U.S. aerospace industry should be deep into defining the Constellation ships, technologies and equipment to fulfill President Bush's mandate. By next summer, Steidle said NASA would have a development plan by which foreign aerospace firms also could participate in the exploration program.

As Constellation's planners go about their early tasks, they have a shiny new logo to inspire them. Three spheres --Earth, the moon and Mars -- are arrayed in sequence, with the streak of a rocket passing through each. A Latin inscription on the emblem says "Audentes Fortuna Juvat," which, translated into English, says "Fortune Favors the Bold."

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