NASA

An estimated 1 million people were camped in beaches and inlets around Kennedy Space Center when the 363-foot-tall Saturn V rocket blasted off at 8:32 a.m. (CDT) on July 16, 1969.

It had all come down to three men sitting atop a 363-foot Saturn V rocket.

In the eight years since President John F. Kennedy stunned the spaceflight community and issued his challenge to put a man on the moon, NASA had spent $25 billion — akin to $140 billion-plus, today — and employed more than 300,000 technicians in its race against the Russians.

The result of these labors sat on a pad at Launch Complex 39A.

At 8:32 a.m. Houston time July 16, 1969, the rocket's engines fired, and the Apollo 11 crew — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — shook, rattled and reached orbit 12 minutes later.

Four days hence, with the planet watching from 240,000 miles away on television signals delayed by 1.3 seconds, Armstrong guided the lunar module Eagle to the surface of the moon. Then he uttered words that would make the city of Houston famous around the world:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Then, and now

That was then, when politics, pride and the lure of the final frontier drove the U.S. space program to a unified goal to land on the moon and return safely, something NASA would do five more times in the subsequent three years. NASA was fueled by ambitious exploration goals and fully backed by Washington to carry out its moon missions.

Today, there's no lack of ambition and goal-setting, with long-range plans for a lunar base and eventually a manned Mars mission. But the political will to do so is questionable, at best, and funding at current levels simply does not support much beyond the status quo.

Thus, while the space agency basks in the distant glow of an event that propelled the United States to the pinnacle of an increasingly technological world, it must also fret about its own future.

Even as the Apollo 11 crew members gather in Washington next week to recall their mission, a panel called by President Barack Obama to review NASA's spaceflight plans will be working nearby on a report due in August.

The panel's mandate, said its chairman, Norman Augustine, is “everything from the flyout of the shuttle to the international space station to new launch capabilities to potential landings possibly on the moon, possibly on Mars, possibly on asteroids or moons of Mars.”

This re-evaluation of NASA's future highlights the chronic funding and political issues that have dogged the space agency since its Apollo landing and have hampered efforts to send humans beyond the lunar surface in the four decades since.

Falling relevance

The first signal of NASA's declining political relevance came almost immediately after the successful Apollo 11 mission, when President Richard Nixon moved to cut funding for the space program, canceling two moon missions. Since then, the space program has seen its share of the federal budget decline from 4 percent to 0.6 percent.

Even so, NASA has attempted to live up to its heritage, said John Logsdon, the Charles A. Lindbergh chair of aerospace history at the National Air and Space Museum, by continuing to propose ambitious missions.

Most recently, it did so in 2004 by preparing a vision to return to the moon by 2020 and to send humans to Mars.

“The goals articulated by President (George W.) Bush in 2004 are good goals,” said Logsdon. “The problem is the political will necessary to carry that out.”

Well before Obama convened the Augustine commission, political dithering as well as the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the economic crisis have acted to marginalize financial support for NASA's vision.

As the Houston-based manager of the space shuttle program, John Shannon has had a front row seat. Shannon is working to fly eight shuttle missions before ending the 28-year-old program late next year. While doing so, he has watched the efforts of Constellation program managers, who are trying to develop the next generation of spacecraft to carry humans to the moon and Mars with less upfront funding than promised.

“They have a good plan,” Shannon said. “Their architecture is good. People say, ‘Ah they're behind schedule,' or ‘They have these technical difficulties.' They just don't have money.

“We see that on the shuttle side very clearly because we're trying to hand over work force, industrial base, rocket testing, the Vertical Assembly Building, and they just don't have the money to pick those things up. So now we're trying to scramble to try and keep things mothballed, and some way to keep the industrial base alive until they're ready, and it's just a mess.”

A move to cooperation

One area where NASA has made significant strides since Apollo is in international relations, said George Abbey, an assistant to the Apollo program manager, and later director of Johnson Space Center from 1996 to 2001.

“We've moved in a direction that's more based on international cooperation, and I think that's taken us in the right direction,” Abbey said. “We started off in Apollo in a competitive program with the Russians. If you look at where we are today, we have programs with the international space station which we're doing with 15 nations.”

Abbey said the Constellation program's development of rockets is solely an American effort and argued that to achieve greater goals NASA must extend the international coalition that built the space station into exploration of outer space.

“Dollars are always going to be a challenge, and if you can utilize their capabilities and complement each other, you can achieve a lot more,” he said.

NASA says it intends to work with international partners once on the surface of the moon.

Buzz Aldrin, among others, argues NASA shouldn't even be going back to the moon and if the U.S. insists on doing so it would be wrong to race other countries to a place Americans have already been. Aldrin also noted that Russia is planning to launch a soil sample-return mission to the Mars moon Phobos, which could be a staging area for human landings on Mars.

“I don't think the American people know that Russia and other nations are actively pursuing things that we've set aside because we're concentrating on doing what we did 40 years ago,” Aldrin said.

“I'm not sure that inviting them to compete, rather than cooperate with us, is productive for anyone,” he said.