DOWN TO EARTH.(space shuttle Columbia accident)

There are federal programs that give succor to the old, the sick, and the hungry, that make food supplies and workplaces safer, and that train armies and buy ships and planes to protect friends and overawe enemies. There are programs that chase crooks and put them in jail. There are programs that support schoolteachers, cotton farmers, forest rangers, and AIDS researchers, and even provide stipends for a few stray artists and philosophers. But there is only one federal program that, at its best, reaches for the grandeur and the wonder that in ages past built great cathedrals and launched wooden ships into unknown waters where dragons lurked.

President Bush seemed to be saying something like that last week in his eulogy for the seven astronauts who died February 1st in the flaming arc of the Columbia. "This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire written in the human heart," Bush said. "We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return." Simple words, good words, and, like many of those prepared for this President's formal delivery, graceful words. The five men and two women of the Columbia crew--in background and origin as exhilaratingly varied as the crew-cut flyboys of the early space program were monochromatic--deserved the homely praise he gave them. (And when their ship went down they deserved better than the shopworn kitsch, the therapized bathos, with which the television news factories automatically responded.) They were talented, resourceful people who took on an assignment that they knew was as dangerous as it was glamorous. They were up to the job. But was the job worthy of them?

Thirty winters ago, in December of 1972, Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan returned safely from the moon. They were the eleventh and twelfth men to walk on the surface of an extraterrestrial world; they were also, so far, the last. No one knew it at the time, but the Homeric age of manned space flight was over. With the completion of the Apollo program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration stood at a fork in the road. As President Kennedy in 1961 had committed the nation to sending a man to the moon by the end of the decade, President Nixon could have proclaimed the goal of mounting an expedition to Mars by the end of the century. Technically, that goal was well within our grasp. But the country, mired in Vietnam and descending into Watergate, was in a sour and suspicious mood, and Nixon, despite an overwhelming reelection victory, was not the man to summon it to starry adventures. Something more practical, more serviceable--something more down to earth--seemed the way to go. So we got the Shuttle.

And there we're stuck. The Shuttle has had its transcendent moments, the greatest of which came in 1993, when it made an ophthalmologic house call on the Hubble Space Telescope and corrected its optical prescription. But, on balance, the Shuttle has been a gigantic mistake. It was a flop well before it became a disaster. Its career has been marked by bad economics, bad science, bad engineering, and bad symbolism.

The Shuttle fleet was supposed to be a safe, reliable workhorse that would make a round trip every week at a cost of ten million dollars each, supplanting disposable rockets and practically paying for itself by doing odd jobs like putting communications satellites into orbit. Instead, until last week it was averaging five trips a year at a half-billion dollars apiece. Single-use rockets, like Europe's Ariane, get most ...