To Infinity and Beyond

They want to build inflatable space hotels.

They may see their plans crushed by the parsimony of federal budgets and the humorlessness of the laws of physics. But there is, at the moment, a renaissance in the Space Age. The sky isn't the limit, suddenly. If all goes right, we'll be zooming all over the solar system. We're back in the game!

Unless it's just a dream.

Grounded

ONE LISTENS TO THE BOLD TALK WITH AN EYEBROW RAISED, like Spock on "Star Trek" whenever Kirk insists on visiting a world with man-eating plants. How much of this stuff is for real?

One day in Orlando everyone took a bus from the Contemporary Resort to Epcot Center, and along the way a smart young aerospace engineer named Tom Hill told me how we can extract helium-3 from moon dirt, turn it into rocket fuel and use it to power the kind of spaceships that could carry people to Mars. He had a contagious enthusiasm. But a skeptical person would have to think: Helium-3? Moon dirt? Mission to Mars? Is this something that is going to actually happen? Or is this just . . . well, is this just Disney World?

Reality check: The American space program is talking about going back to the moon at a time when, last anyone looked, the only American in space is a fellow on the space station who cadged a ride on a Russian rocket.

The first agenda item for the Vision is getting the space shuttle flying again. The shuttle Discovery stands at Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, poised for the return to flight as soon as NASA works through a checklist of post-Columbia-disaster fixes. We dream of the moon and Mars while hoping to get back to LEO. Visionaries draw up plans for starships, but we still need to figure out how to keep chunks of insulating foam from flying off the big shuttle fuel tank and dinging the wing of the orbiter.

The space program has a passel of problems. The Hubble Space Telescope is sinking toward Earth, its orbit "decaying," and the former NASA boss said the space agency couldn't do anything about it. Too dangerous to send astronauts to fix it, he said. Sorry, can't do.

Meanwhile there's that international space station up there, incomplete, overbudget, insufficiently international, underused (what exactly is it for?) and currently home to two men who do a lot of janitorial work.

Space just isn't what it used to be. It's no longer the obvious destination of humankind. It's no longer synonymous with the future. Nanotechnology, biotech, genomics, photonics, artificial intelligence, all that sort of high-tech, gee-whiz stuff you read about in Wired magazine, may now be what space used to be. Astronauts always talk about how spaceflight shows us a small world without borders, but the same point is made when you call your credit card company and find yourself speaking to someone in Manila.

Even space buffs concede the cultural shift. Bretton Alexander, a space entrepreneur who helped write the Vision, said: "We're true believers in space, but we're not so naive as to think that space is still the center of the universe -- politically, technologically. It is not the center of America's consciousness the way it was in the '60s, and never will be."