To Infinity and Beyond

Many people grew up thinking of "Star Trek" as a documentary of the future. They were ready to be best friends with a Vulcan. Some of them may feel a bit betrayed. In his book Lost in Space, Greg Klerkx asks the essential questions: "What happened to the Space Age? And how do we get it back?"

The Vision

THE ANSWER, IF YOU BELIEVE THE NASA PEOPLE, is the Vision. The Vision is a reaffirmation of the faith, an attempt to say that the Space Age lives.

But it is a Vision hampered by inertial forces: the mass and momentum of the shuttle and the space station. The space program is an oil tanker that can't possibly turn on a dime. Thus the first items in this great new Vision include a return to the tedious things we've been doing for three decades.

The space station, however, will be dedicated to exploratory needs, such as studying the long-term effects of weightlessness on humans. NASA plans to send a robotic mission to the moon by 2008, laying the groundwork for the return of astronauts. In 2010, we'll retire the shuttle and build a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle. The plan is to send astronauts to the moon no later than 2020, and establish a moon base similar to what we've got down in Antarctica.

Eventually (the Vision gets blurry here), we'll send humans to Mars, to the near-Earth asteroids, to the moons of Jupiter, wherever we want to go. We'll have busted free of LEO. The space agency will be dedicated to Exploration. That word is so sanctified at headquarters that it's always capitalized.

The Vision emerged from the wreckage of Columbia. After seven astronauts died aboard the burning, disintegrating shuttle in February 2003, the accident investigation board said NASA not only had institutional flaws, but lacked any real vision. Meanwhile, a handful of White House staffers tried to figure out what the space program should do with itself. After nearly a year of effort (the definitive account of which can be found in New Moon Rising, by Frank Sietzen Jr. and Keith Cowing), they produced the Vision.

The president announced the Vision on January 14, 2004. The new agenda grabbed the attention of the space community but never quite captured the public imagination. Bush didn't even mention it in his subsequent State of the Union address. During the presidential campaign, the future of NASA barely ranked as an issue.

But even this lack of attention is in keeping with the Vision's strategy. It's not a crash program and supposedly won't require the psychic and budgetary energy that went into Apollo. The Vision's promoters want to avoid a repeat of the notorious Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), announced by President George H.W. Bush in 1989. SEI had the basic Vision conceits of a return to the moon and voyages to Mars. But that plan was a whale with suckerfish all over it. It had all kinds of shuttles and space stations and moon bases and Mars rockets and everything this side of starships screaming toward the Andromeda Galaxy. Rumors circulated that it would cost $400 billion, a number that spooked Congress. SEI went to the graveyard of government acronyms.

The Vision has no official price tag, because it claims that NASA won't need any extra money to go to the moon and Mars. We'll go slowly, on the cheap. A skeptical observer might wonder how the government could inexpensively send people to another planet when it can barely afford to run trains from Washington to New York.

The Vision emits a whiff of conflict avoidance. It's almost a stealth program, an attempt to tippy-toe to the moon and beyond by noncontroversial increments. In the near term, there's no singular moment when we decide, as a country, that we're definitely doing this. John Logsdon, the sage academic who runs a think tank called the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: "If you're really cynical, you could say that this plan makes that decision without a decision . . . If it works, one day we're there."

It's, like, Oh, by the way, we're back on the moon.