For example, you won't find many kids expecting Spirit, or its sister ship Opportunity, which was scheduled to land on Mars over the weekend, to bump into little green Martians.

Alamo Elementary School third-grader Haley Pihowich says matter of fact that there's no such thing as Martians.

"Duh, they'd need water to live, and it doesn't look like there's water on Mars anymore," she says while visiting the Chabot Space and Science Center's Mars Encounter exhibit.

"There still could be life on Mars," Haley adds. "But it's probably more like bacteria in the soil or in the polar icecaps."

Kindergarteners Blue Growden and Mazatl Huitzilopochtli from Oakland's Sequoia Elementary School are mixed on the life on Mars question.

"There are no people on Mars because it's not Earth," Mazatl says.

Blue is more considered in his answer: "There are people on Mars. But they probably look like astronauts."

Looking at the latest photographs from Spirit projected onto a giant screen in the Mars exhibit, Blue says the barren, rusty landscape doesn't look too inviting.

"I don't think it would be fun to play on Mars," Blue says. "You can't run because you might trip on a rock. But I might like to try and play tag."

Just as the Apollo missions did decades ago, the U.S. Space Program has once again captured the imagination of the youngest generation.

The Alamo third-graders have been talking about Mars a lot in the classroom and at home, they say.

Terilyn Stoflet played the planet Mars in a classroom play the other day.

"Mars is red, so it's the angry planet," she says. "I was very angry in the play."

Classmate Bridget Haus adds that Mars is angry because it was the Roman god of war.

"Mars is getting so much attention now that I think it's probably less angry," Bridget says. "I'm wearing red today, but I'm not angry."

Teacher Karen Andrew says her students are wildly enthusiastic about events on Mars -- a cold, red planet more than 35 million miles from Earth.

"They just eat it up," she says. "There's a lot more for me to keep up with because so much is happening on a daily basis with new photographs and new information coming from the rover. But it's wonderful for the kids because it's exploration of the unknown, and there just isn't much left that's unknown."

With the rovers tooling around the chilly Martian terrain and President Bush reinvigorating the space initiative with proposed manned moon and Mars landings by 2020, space, "the final frontier," is cool again.

For kids who wanted to grow up to be astronauts in 1970, probably the best they could have done was become a member of a space shuttle team. But now it looks like the market is once again open for astronauts in training.

Up in the Oakland hills at a bustling, Mars-centric Chabot, students from all around the Bay Area and beyond spend field trip days watching a Mars planetarium show called "Return to the Red Planet," running their hands over the volcanoes and canyons on a 4-foot-tall replica of Mars and experiencing a simulated space journey called "Escape from the Red Planet."

Sitting in front of a video game in which they are planning their own manned space flight to Mars, Erin Anderson and Courtney Sitzman, both fifth-graders at Orinda's Sleepy Hollow Elementary School, say their interest level in Mars is soaring.

"I'm going to be a scientist and study Mars," Courtney says. And how long has she wanted to pursue this occupation? "Since the Spirit landed a couple weeks ago," she answers.

Courtney says she would definitely consider being a Mars mission astronaut.

"I want to really dig deep into the planet and see if there's water," she says.

Having seen the photographs Spirit sent back of the rocky, inhospitable Martian landscape, Erin says she'd still like to visit Mars.

"There's a lot of dirt on Mars," she says. "You could totally motocross."

On the video screen, the girls have loaded up their spacecraft with supplies and personnel. In one corner, the game keeps track of their mission's budget, which sits at $52,548,000. The real-life price tag of the Spirit and Opportunity Mars missions is closer to $820 million, and Bush's initial five-year proposal to ignite the manned space program is $12 billion, which would escalate to $170 million once flight begins.

That means that Courtney and Erin's generation likely will be manning and paying for our future in space.

"I think it's totally worth the expense," Courtney says.

"You have to have some limits," Erin adds. "You can't spend too much because we still have to do things on Earth."

Erin's mom, Terri Anderson, remembers watching the first moon landing when she was a child but says kids are more jaded now.

"It was all so new then," she says. "There have been so many technological advances since then that it's all less exciting. The idea of sending people to Mars is actually quite exciting, though. I see the kids getting excited by that, while other space stuff is pretty much status quo."

Later in the afternoon, the Sleepy Hollow students are broken into groups. Some students "man" the Mars spacecraft, while the others don headsets and take seats in mission control under the watchful eye of lead flight director Tony Idarola.

The students watch their screens diligently, make announcements into the headsets and communicate with each other via Post-it notes. The scene looks like a miniature ground control version of "Apollo 13."

Fifth-grader Blake Swimmer plans on becoming an astronaut, but don't talk to him about the moon because "it's boring."

"I would like to be one of the first people on Mars," he says. "We can't go to Jupiter because it's raining acid. But Mars, even though it's really cold at night, is some place we could survive. It's a totally different world with sandstorms and volcanoes. I want to go to Mars because that's where you have adventures."

You can e-mail Chad Jones at## cjones@angnewspapers.com or call (925) 416-4853.

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