Earlier this month, the shuttle Discovery touched back down at Cape Canaveral, Fla., after a 13-day space flight covering 5.3 million miles.

Yawn.

The story was buried on page 7A of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The front page carried headlines about a tsunami in Indonesia, an exodus from Lebanon and a fundraiser for a porn star running for governor.

It's time to kick start some excitement into the U.S. space program again. Nevada has a large area called the Nevada Test Site that could be used for the space program, if they run out of room at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., or Cape Canaveral.

The biggest news about the latest Discovery mission was foam. The major objectives of the mission were to test a redesigned fuel tank which carries less foam and getting ready for more space station construction. Does anybody know what we're doing at the space station other than seeing how long some Russian guy can stay in outer space? For a while the news about the program was taking someone from another nationality into space.

I remember when I was a boy, President Kennedy in 1961 declared that before the decade was finished, America would land a man on the moon. I was 17 years old when we realized that dream; I came home from work as a bus boy and saw my dad watching the first Americans landing on the moon on Apollo 11 in July 1969. The famous words uttered by astronaut Neal Armstrong, "That's one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind" will be forever etched in the history books.

The Apollo program is finished. The main thrust to the space program back then was the fact America was competing against the Russians. The Russians sent the first spacecraft into outer space with Sputnik I in 1957. Now there isn't any competition.

Then there were some classified Defense Department payloads.

It's time we send a man to Mars. U.S. officials are finally raising that issue. The red planet has long fascinated astronomers on earth. It's the only other planet that could possibly hold some form of life. I assumed landing a man on Mars would come soon after the moon, a lifeless piece of rock in space.

I realize there have been disasters with the space program, the disintegration of Columbia while landing in 2003 and the explosion of Challenger after taking off in 1986. But what is the long-term mission of NASA anyway?

When I was a boy I had thought it might be possible to travel into outer space during my lifetime. A few very rich people have flown on missions into space; the first passenger went with a Russian spacecraft as NASA didn't want to allow it. But back in the 1960s people were more obsessed with technology. There was the TV show "Flash Gordon," in which the hero flew around with a jet-pack strapped to his back. There was James Bond with his trainer Q demonstrating all those fancy gadgets. I remember being a junior high school student, excitedly looking at the rings of Saturn through a telescope at an observatory.

I remember watching a show called "The 21^st Century," moderated by famed TV anchorman Walter Cronkite. One episode showed Walter riding in a monorail, which science-fiction films often portrayed as the transportation of the future. We can ride a monorail now in Las Vegas, but it only travels a short ways, its losing a lot of money and its financing is in junk bond status.

It was encouraging to read another newspaper article this month about the Lunar Commerce Executive Roundtable held in Las Vegas. There attendees had the chance to expand their horizons and talk about mining on the moon, cruise ships in space, solar power plants orbiting the sun and other concepts.

We could do more experiments other than to see how cockroaches fare under weightlessness.

If nothing else, I'll volunteer to go up in space. I can say I did my part for the NASA space program, but it was out of a need for money rather than patriotism, though I bragged to people afterwards like I was doing my bit for my country.

I was between jobs back in 1982 and staying with my brother in Clear Lake City, Texas, a Houston suburb right near NASA. I was sleeping on the couch at night and looking for an offshore job in the day. My sister-in-law noticed an advertisement in the Clear Lake City newspaper for NASA test subjects.

I signed and initialed the forms at a table with a number of lab technicians in white coats looking on. I was checked into Mercy Hospital. The first four days we didn't do anything; I only had to be on a salt-free diet. We toured Mission Control, the room where I saw the map of the world on the wall and where I used to see footage of the NASA technicians monitoring those early space missions. It looked a lot smaller than I expected it to be. We saw a couple Saturn booster rockets on the ground. I viewed the tiny Mercury capsule occupied by John Glenn, who returned to earth to a ticker tape parade in 1962 after orbiting the earth three times. In that tiny capsule he certainly had to have "the right stuff."

I was participating in a bed rest study. In space, the fluids of the body rise due to weightlessness, the astronauts don't have gravity to hold them down. So to simulate that condition, I had to lie in bed for three days at a six degree angle with my feet higher than my head. I only got up out of bed for a minute in the morning, to be weighed.

After three days I felt pretty nauseous. I was constipated. It was somewhat similar to what they call space sickness. I wouldn't envy the astronauts who had to experience this medical condition. The technicians took frequent urine samples; they put a radioactive tracer in my blood. The first day of testing they also put a catheter into the main artery leading to my heart, a procedure for which I received $1,000 alone.

People jokingly asked me if I glowed in the dark after the study. I took home about $1,700 for the week-long study, not bad for someone out of a job. My girlfriend flew into Houston and we vacationed in Oaxaca state in southern Mexico for two weeks.

NASA started taking up ordinary citizens for the space ride, until the Challenger disaster in 1986 when teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe perished along with the crew. There was a cartoon in "Doonesbury" at the time, joking about the proposal to take a journalist along. The author speculated what it would be like if CBS-TV news commentator Andy Rooney was asked to go into space. The cartoon showed a space capsule in with the caption from a hypothetical Andy Rooney quote, "You know what I really hate about these space capsules?"

If they decided to fly a mission to Mars I'd like to volunteer. I've already experienced space sickness. I'd be ready to take that space walk and look at the beautiful, blue globe of earth. Maybe then we can tell radio announcer Art Bell if there really are extraterrestrials up there.

And what better place to get involved in the space program than right here in Nevada?