CAPE CANAVERAL -- They did it again last week, to minimal fanfare. Out at Pad B, seven human beings climbed into a spaceship pointed toward the blue Florida sky.
So many things had to go right. Half a million gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen had to burn correctly. Bolts had to blow at just the right moment. Seconds before liftoff, a quarter of a million gallons of water flooded the pad to dampen the vibrations. In theory, the astronauts could escape a disaster by hopping into baskets and sliding down wires to the perimeter fence.
But everything worked. Eight and a half minutes after liftoff the astronauts were in orbit. Even critics admit that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has mastered the technological side of space travel.
Yet these are ominous times for NASA. Sept. 11 has changed national priorities, and sending people into space does not appear to be high on the government's agenda. A panel of experts recently criticized NASA for spending billions more than expected on the International Space Station. The space station may never be fully built, which has outraged NASA insiders as well as the United States' foreign partners.
All this has made people here at the Kennedy Space Center apprehensive. They worry that the NASA of the future may not share their enthusiasm for rocketing astronauts into orbit. They also worry that NASA's future administrator is a budget expert who speaks nary a word about the grand, romantic aspirations of the Space Age.
"Where," asked Robert B. Sieck, the former launch director and now a NASA adviser, "does human spaceflight factor into the big picture?"
A Fading Sense of Urgency
This part of the world is hallowed ground for the space community. The cape is dominated by the Vehicle Assembly Building, 525 feet high, forever encircled by buzzards, with doors tall enough to admit a vertical moon rocket.
But it's a period piece now. It was thrown up without architectural flourish at the height of the Space Race, when the United States was desperate to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who years ago rode the space shuttle into orbit, said last week that the VAB has panels coming loose. "God help us if a hurricane comes through there," he said.
The Apollo Era's sense of urgency is gone. America's enemies today are not the kind of people who possess a space program.
NASA's most immediate problem is that the space station costs billions of dollars more than expected. That's been a chronic situation for a project that began in 1984 as Space Station Freedom, then morphed in 1993 into an international collaboration.
No one really knows what a finished station would cost. NASA said earlier this year that it faces a $4.8 billion shortfall over the next five years. Sean O'Keefe, the man nominated by President Bush to become NASA administrator, testified Friday that he had "no confidence" in that number or any other estimate he had heard so far.
Roy Bridges, director of the Kennedy Space Center, says the space station is a complicated piece of hardware built by several different nations. Some components are never put together until they get into orbit. Just about everything is custom-made -- there's hardly a screw or bolt anywhere on the station that's off-the-shelf.
"Nobody's ever built a space station before -- there's really not a lot of cost models out there," Bridges said.
Bridges, a former astronaut, believes that space exploration is essential to America's cultural survival. He knows that NASA is not an entitlement program, that it's part of the discretionary portion of the federal budget. He also knows what it's like to float to the window of the space shuttle and see an entire continent below him.
