In Search of the Next Frontier

Gallery

NASA Turns 50

After a half a century at work, NASA is assessing its past and looking ahead to navigate its future.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

The how was generally understood, too: We would put people on top of rockets. Rockets had been around only for a few decades and had their first dramatic impact when the Nazis used them to bombard England during World War II. Huge new rockets were a side effect of the Cold War. What wasn't known for sure in 1958 was whether a person could survive in a weightless environment. Also, our rockets initially had a nasty habit of exploding on the launchpad.

The why was obvious: We were in a white-knuckle contest with the Soviet Union, which had a head start into space, bigger rockets and maybe (we wondered) all manner of malign purposes for orbital platforms. Maybe they'd drop bombs on us from up there.

Half a century on, NASA faces a more complicated political, budgetary and technological landscape, and its ambitions are not limited to human flight. Bigger space telescopes are coming, the search for extraterrestrial life and distant solar systems is in full swing, and robotic space probes regularly produce dramatic findings. But the public's eye tends to focus on the agency's grand plans to fly astronauts beyond Earth orbit -- and no one knows if they will come to fruition.

NASA is in the process of finishing the international space station, retiring the space shuttle and building a new architecture for putting humans in space, with the Constellation program. The agency is following a road map called the Vision For Space Exploration, adopted in 2005 with President Bush's imprimatur. That plan calls for a return of astronauts to the moon and the establishment of a permanent base there as a staging ground for missions that might someday include putting humans on Mars.

But without a space race or any national groundswell of opinion in favor of ambitious human spaceflight, the Vision has to proceed in an incremental, bureaucratic manner, keeping within a flat NASA budget. That means that most of the money to build the new system will become available only when the shuttle is retired in 2010. That also means the United States will not be able to launch

astronauts into space for about five years. The plan calls for us to hitch rides from the Russians. But the U.S.-Russia relationship has been deteriorating.

This makes the next few years a slippery time for NASA. At any point Congress or the White House could decide that the nation's priorities do not include sending people back to the moon. Joseph Alexander, of the Space Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences, says he worries that NASA is being "set up to fail."

"The program is in danger of completely running aground at this point," Alexander said. "Within the constraints that this administration has put on NASA's budget, you can't get there from here."

Brett Alexander, who as a Bush administration staffer was a primary author of the Vision and now works for the X Prize Foundation, thinks NASA has made a mistake by not letting other government agencies and the private sector play a larger role.

"It's a NASA-only infrastructure. That, to me, is the Achilles heel for the future. All the funding, all the capabilities, all the infrastructure is borne by the NASA budget," Alexander said.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin knows all the challenges the agency faces, but there is no more persuasive advocate for a civilian, government-run spaceflight program.

Griffin, interviewed recently in his ninth-floor NASA office -- he took a few swings with a golf club, then held forth for 100 minutes, answering some of the questions with 15-minute dissertations on why we go into space -- thinks that human beings thousands of years from now will benefit from what we do today. He says the Constellation program isn't just about going back to the moon.