Twenty-five years ago, Neil Armstrong stepped from his spaceship onto the Moon and planted an American flag, closing a dramatic chapter in a frantic game of technical one-upmanship that began with the Soviet launching of Sputnik.

Isolated in time, the moment was astounding, its purpose clear and its price unimportant. Set in history, however, the Apollo Moon landing is a monument to politics and a gauge of how far the country has drifted from its goals. As the debate over the future of human space flight continues in Congress, which once again is questioning its commitment to leading an international space-station effort, consider this: What if R2D2 instead of Armstrong had touched the lifeless sands of Tranquillity Base?

The battle over the space station and the future of piloted space flight stems from a dual and sometimes conflicting role for NASA, the agency charged with overseeing the country's civilian space programs.

The United States went to the Moon not for science but for peace. President Kennedy irrevocably knit politics to space when he issued his bold declaration that America would send men to the Moon and return them to Earth. It was gutsy. It was daring. It would teach those communists to keep their flashy, long-range missiles to themselves--rocketry shockingly displayed in 1957 when the world's first satellite was launched into orbit.

Project Apollo was a political solution to a foreign-relations nightmare: keeping peace in a world ideologically and economically divided, yet united in shared knowledge of mass and mutually destructive weapons. In this atmosphere of fear and bravado, NASA blossomed.

Besides serving as a Cold War warrior, the space program offered unprecedented opportunities for scientific inquiry, exploring the universe beyond Earth, and testing the properties of zero gravity. Unlike the glorious Apollo program, these studies were pursued at a fraction of the cost using expendable rockets with automated equipment. NASA led the way on this space frontier as well.

Initially NASA wore its two hats admirably, landing humans on the Moon and dispatching robots for planetary surveys with equal aplomb. The agency enjoyed a generous checkbook and happily reconciled the demands of piloted and robotic space exploration by paying for both. Once Project Apollo was over, however, and the country began brooding over Vietnam, NASA funding nose-dived and the agency was left struggling for purpose and survival.

With political justification for the piloted space-flight program faltering, NASA embraced economics, pitching its next program, the space shuttle, as an inexpensive, all-purpose vehicle for transporting people and payloads into space. The economic emphasis placed limits on the long-term and intangible rewards of exploration and science, but NASA saw its future in piloted space flight and persisted, sacrificing science for shuttles and polarizing support for the space program in the process. The shuttle has proved a financial failure, but NASA stands by it and its follow-on program, the beleaguered space station, as cornerstones of the piloted space program.

"Americans are able to identify and relate to the human experience. If we are to be explorers as a society, we cannot explore with just robots. We cannot have exploration without humans," says NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin.

Human space flight may indeed capture Americans' fancy, but it also costs dearly. NASA's piloted space program consumes roughly half the agency's $14.5 billion budget and employs the lion's share of a 20,000-member work force and 200,000-member contractor-support team. The high overhead draws ire, but the jobs it supports have saved NASA's troubled space station time and time again.

The station, a $26 billion orbital outpost, is NASA's next goal for human space flight. The project has been redesigned, restructured, and hotly debated for more than a decade, with no end to the controversy in sight. Last year, after narrowly escaping a congressional proposal to terminate the program, space station funding was frozen at $2.1 billion a year, a figure the agency said it could live with.

Humans versus robots

Scientists, however, are concerned that NASA's emphasis on piloted space flight will push robotics and other space-science missions onto the endangered species list. They argue that the space age may have been born in politics, but its fixture is in science and commercial exploitation. The shuttle not only shortchanged science projects but curtailed development of other launchers that could provide lower-cost, more reliable, faster access to space.

"Most scientists would have preferred that NASA put more money into lifters in the 1970s [when the shuttle was under development] rather than just the shuttle," says Robert O'Connell, an astronomer with the University of Virginia who has worked on several NASA-sponsored programs. "That would have been much better and much less costly for getting scientific payloads into space. It wasn't until the late 1970s that scientists who were working with NASA started to see that the shuttle was taking over science.

"Now, it looks like what we're facing in the future is much worse," he adds.

Scientists' demands for access to space far outstrip NASA's ability to supply the rides, a situation that is deterring students from pursuing graduate and postgraduate space-science research, scientists say. For example, two recent NASA solicitations for microgravity-research proposals generated hundreds more responses than the few dozen experiments the agency has money to fund.

"It's beyond competitive," says Dean Churchill, an atmospheric-sciences researcher at the University of Miami in Florida. "It's almost a lottery of who has the right proposal for a particular project manager at a particular time for the right amount of money. It's gotten to be a gamble."

NASA sets aside 20-30 percent of its budget for robotics and space science, including some spacecraft designed with expensive but flexible capability for shuttle deployment. The agency's proposed five-year, $100 billion spending plan, built around the space station, is being revised to fit an estimated $70 billion purse, a challenging task the Congressional Budget Office and others doubt can be accomplished without scaling down some NASA programs and eliminating others.

Among the alternatives outlined in the March 1994 Reinventing NASA study are a $12 billion-a-year program that highlights science and cuts piloted space flight and a $7 billion annual plan emphasizing new technologies for space and aeronautics, along with application-oriented science missions.

Fearing a squeeze on science if NASA's 1995 $14.3 billion budget request is chopped, Rep. George Brown, a California Democrat who chairs a key NASA oversight committee, has pledged to withdraw his support for the space station and redistribute the money to space science and advanced-technology programs, a proposal that would fundamentally change the civilian space program.

ôThis is the most critical time that the station has faced," says Joanne Gabrynowicz, an associate professor of space law and policy at the University of North Dakota. "If they go ahead and build it at current projected costs, other space-science projects are going to suffer horribly."

However, canceling the space station is no guarantee the savings would be funneled into other space-science projects.

"Look what happened to the superconducting supercollider," points out Goldin. "There were a bunch of scientists who said, `What a disaster this thing is. Let's cancel it, reprogram the money, and do some real good science.' Guess what happened? Congress canceled the program, and after the feeding frenzy was over, not a nickel went into small science projects."

Eliminating the space station could kill NASA, adds Goldin. If the station goes, budget pressures will remain, and it won't be long before the shuttle and NASA's work force line up at the chopping block, he warns.

ôThe real issue is, does America want a space program or not?ö says Goldin. "Do we want to stop what President Kennedy started?ö

No Buck Rogers, no bucks?

Far from bringing about the demise of space science, critics argue, the death of the space station would invigorate stagnant and declining robotic and automated-science missions.

"It's a put-down to say if there is no manned program then there wouldn't be an unmanned program," says noted space physicist James Van Allen, a professor at the University of Iowa. "It's a great mistake to think NASA has to make its future on spectaculars. That's a very fragile way to run an agency.

ôThe space station gives the whole space program a bad name," he adds. "If the space station were terminated, I think it would shift the agency's emphasis toward automated and maneuverable machines and improve the public's perceptions of the space program."

Station advocates argue that the piloted space-exploration missions support public financing of the science investigations.

"If the space station goes down, it's a good bet that the shuttle will go down as well," says Mark Hopkins, president of Spacecause, a Washington, D.C.-based prospace lobbying group. "That will kill human space flight in this country. The question then is, what will happen to unmanned space science? If human space flight went away, probably the other programs would be pared down as well."

Adds Goldin: "If we cancel the human space-flight program, America has walked off the playing field that we designed, and we're going to watch the rest of the world come together and do the things that need to be done. And don't you think there's going to be continuing pressure to cut the budget?"

Cold War casualties

Although the debate over piloted and automated space exploration hinges on money, an ideological shift underlies the conflict. The Cold War forced America to take a leadership position in a dangerous but predictable world. There was focus to the Apollo program, a raison d'etre. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the failure of communism, the space program, like the rest of the country, is struggling for equilibrium on safer but shifting ground.

"Ten years ago, we had to show leadership in the world community," says Ray Williamson, a space-program analyst with the Office of Technology Assessment. "Political parties see less value in people in space now than when we were locking horns with the Soviet Union. If you want to have people in space, you really have to ask why."

Support for human space flight now depends less on politics than on jobs and international relations. President Clinton has made the space station a cornerstone of a foreign-aid plan to help Russia and steer its unstable economy away from commercial missile production. In addition, canceling the station would further strain relations with Japan, Europe, and Canada, which have pledged an estimated $9 billion to the program and already have spent about $4 billion.

"If America wants a crisis in international science and technology, canceling the space station is going to be a very big step forward in that domain," says Goldin. "If we cancel the space station, we're going to have an incredible crisis well beyond the NASA budget."

Part of the problem with the station is a lack of scientific support. "It's not about science; it never was," says O'Connell. "It's an exploration mission.

ôThe space station is kind of like a big public-works project. It doesn't excite most people. It's not a giant leap forward," he adds.

The controversy over the station and the U.S. space program is symbolic of a national identity crisis spawned by the fall of communism and nurtured by worldwide economic upheaval. In this setting, cooperation is replacing leadership as the country's prime directive.

`The good news is the country is only 200 years old," says space-policy expert Gabrynowicz. ôThat's like a 21-year-old coming out of adolescence and beginning to ask, `Who am I going to be in the twenty-first century? What do I want to do in the world community?'ö

Although it is no longer threatened by Soviet missiles, the United States faces a much more insidious, potentially dangerous crisis, maintains Goldin, noting a "hopelessness, a lack of direction and optimism about the future among American youth.

"All these people who talk about what could be, what should be, what might be, what ought to be in terms of future investment will never see it," he cautions. "America has got to decide, are we going to be consumers or are we going to invest? This is the year that America has to decide."

Additional Reading

Congressional Budget Office, Reinventing NASA, Washington, D.C., March 1994. Available at no charge from CBO Publications Office (202) 226-2809.

Robert Lewis, Space in the 21 st Century, Columbia University Press, New York, 1989.

Howard McCurdy, Inside NASA: Technological Choice and Bureaucratic Challenge in the Making of Space Policy, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1993.

Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo: The Race to the Moon, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1989.

U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Exploring the Moon and Mars: Choices for the Nation, GPO, Washington, D.C., July 1991.