The sober realities of manned space flight: with feet planted firmly on the ground, a look at the sky-high costs and mixed results at NASA.(Cover Story)

President Bush's announcement of a 280-million-mile manned space flight to Mars caught everyone by surprise. Space enthusiasts, arguing for years that NASA had lost its way, were electrified. "We've been stuck in low Earth orbit for decades," said Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society. "The goal should be exploration." NASA, still recovering from the recent Space Shuttle catastrophe, was eager to rededicate itself. A quick NASA calculation, however, revealed that the Mars effort would cost nearly $500 billion over 30 years. With funding tight and trouble brewing in the Middle East, Congress decided to ignore the project. After very little debate, the proposal dropped from sight.

That's what happened in 1989 when the elder President Bush proposed a manned flight to Mars by 2019. In 2004, President Bush the younger returned to his father's unfinished business and called for his own revival of space exploration, which would have astronauts getting back to the moon in 2020 and on to Mars thereafter. Only a year before, NASA director Sean O'Keefe was calling such an idea a "Hail Mary pass" and urging the public to be satisfied with slow, steady exploration by robotic probes. But the spirit of adventure seemed to be reasserting itself. As the President put it at a memorial service for the Columbia astronauts last year, "This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we chose. It is a desire written in the human heart."

The $500 billion price tag has been scaled down considerably. Building on existing research, NASA will begin with $12 billion in spending over the next five years. Among most space veterans, however, these initial estimates are treated as a joke. "The Space Shuttle was originally supposed to break even and fly every two weeks," reminds Greg Klerkx, whose book Lost in Space is a critique of NASA. "It ended up costing $500 million per launch, and flying four or five times a year. When President Ronald Reagan first proposed the International Space Station, it was scheduled to be finished in eight years and cost $9 billion. Now it's over $70 billion and still isn't scheduled for completion until 2010.

"This is the picture of a federal agency immune to the competitive influences of the private sector. "You see this little metal loop? It's called a carabineer," California space entrepreneur Rick Tumlinson told a Senate hearing right after the President's announcement in January. "You could go to any sporting goods shop and buy it for $20. Yet NASA pays over $1,000 for the same object because of its procurement methods. It's the 'not-invented-here' mentality and distrust of the private sector that makes the cost of these projects so astronomical."

So will the Mars expedition be different? "The obstacles in getting to Mars are going to be bureaucratic, not technological," says Howard McCurdy, a space program expert at American University. "The NASA that got to the moon in 1969 was a totally different animal from the NASA that got the job in 1961. The current NASA may have to undergo the same kind of transformation."

NASA has always been a mix of science and show business. "The moon expedition was basically an episode of the Cold War," says Dr. Eligar Sadeh, assistant professor at the Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences. "Planting the flag, putting footprints on the moon--that was done to prove we had a better system than the Soviet Union. Since then, NASA has never been able to refocus its mission."

Neil Armstrong's "One giant step for mankind" defined a generation. Yet few people remember that after 1972 the last three Apollo missions were canceled because the public was losing interest. There are only so many times you can hit a golf ball on the moon. "There's a need for heroics," says Supriya Chakrabarti, director of the Boston University Center for Space Physics. "It's hard for the public to get excited about astronomers looking at squiggly lines on their computer screens."