Washington ? President Bush will announce plans next week to send Americans to Mars and establish a permanent human presence on the moon, senior administration officials said Thursday night.

Bush won’t propose sending Americans to Mars anytime soon; rather, he envisions preparing for the mission more than a decade from now, one official said.

In addition to proposing the first trip to the moon since December 1972, the president wants to build a permanent space station there.

Three senior officials said Bush wanted to aggressively reinvigorate the space program, which has been demoralized by a series of setbacks, including the space shuttle disaster last February that killed seven astronauts.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Bush’s announcement would come in the middle of next week.

Bush has been expected to propose a bold new space mission in an effort to rally Americans around a unifying theme as he campaigns for re-election.

Many insiders had speculated he might set forth goals at the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ famed flight last month in North Carolina. Instead, he said only that America would continue to lead the world in aviation.

Earlier, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with Bush in Florida that the president would make an announcement about space next week, but he declined to give details.

It’s possible Bush could make the announcement in his State of the Union address later this month, painfully close to the anniversaries of both the Challenger and Columbia tragedies.

It was the Columbia tragedy that helped force a discussion of where NASA should venture beyond the space shuttle and international space station. The panel that investigated the Columbia accident called for a clearly defined long-term mission — a national vision for space that has gone missing for three decades.