In my opinion, it was a big mistake to land a man on the moon. Now everything else is compared with that feat. --Jerry Seinfeld
Heading east from Houston down NASA Road 1, you ease into the heart of the space agency with an appropriate sense of confusion. First you come to the NASA Cafe, which serves Middle Eastern food. Then there's Space Center Houston, which is not a launching site but a museum-cum-theme park. A bit farther down the road, looking somewhat less inviting, is the real thing: the Johnson Space Center, home of mission control for the space shuttle (as it was for Apollo and all but the earliest manned missions), training ground for the astronauts, and headquarters for the nascent space station.
Just inside the center's gate a bored clerk writes out a pass without bothering to check any ID.
(After all, what's the threat? These days we can't give this stuff to the Russians fast enough.) Then, in a field across the street from the security checkpoint, you confront a staggering sight: a Saturn V rocket of the type that carried Apollo capsules to the moon, lying on its side, its three stages slightly splayed. If the rocket were closer to Houston's urban sprawl, surely someone by now would have spray-painted a message on its side: I'VE FALLEN, AND I CAN'T GET UP.
NASA may be forever doomed to suffer by comparison with that defining moment 25 years ago when an American astronaut first kicked up moondust. Until then everything the agency had done seemed to compose a bold arrow upward: from satellite, to man in orbit, to multiastronaut, multicraft maneuvers, to an unmanned moon landing, to a man on the moon. After Apollo the arrow was inevitably left pointing toward a manned mission to Mars. Plans started to take shape at NASA and in the mind of the public. The craft would be launched from a space station, from which materials and astronauts would be ferried back and forth to Earth by a space shuttle. Even as recently as a few years ago, politicians still felt safe in conjuring up this grand vision of our future in space. We could expect to be kicking Martian dust, we were told by President Bush, by 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11.
