NASA has aged -- but has it grown up?

The crews of Apollo 11 (top) and the upcoming space shuttle Columbia mission (below)

ALSO Today's astronauts a different breed

INTERACTIVE The Space Race

July 13, 1999
Web posted at: 6:29 p.m. EDT (2229 GMT)

By Robin Lloyd
CNN Interactive Senior Writer

(CNN) -- From the moon to the outer edges of the universe.

From nearly 6 percent of the annual federal budget during the most flush years of the Apollo program to less than 1 percent of the 1999 federal budget.

Within those contrasts lays much of the story of how NASA has matured since Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969. Whether you like the grownup agency that NASA has become depends upon whom you ask.

Most people agree that NASA, now 41 years old, has come a long way from the exuberant group of engineers that set out to meet President John F. Kennedy's 1961 challenge to put a man on the moon by the decade's end.

"The big difference between NASA of the '60s and NASA of the '90s is that in every way NASA was a young organization back then," says author Andrew Chaikin, "not only in a demographic sense but also in terms of the life of the agency."

When Kennedy issued his lunar challenge, some NASA staffers thought he was out of his mind, says Chaikin, who wrote "Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts."

"It was like telling a high school team that in eight years they were going to have to win the World Series," Chaikin says. "It's not impossible but not something that you would necessarily think they could do."

A Goldin era

The "can-do" spirit embodied by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the Apollo era has been revived by NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, who often shows up for public events with cowboy boots peeking out from under his trousers.

But Goldin came to NASA in 1992 from private industry, and that fact underscores another major characteristic of today's NASA -- it is a bureaucratic complex with commercial ties. The agency oversees not one major program but several programs -- and dozens of missions ranging from a project to collect comet dust to an orbiting observatory to study black holes and X-rays spit up by galactic clouds.

"The past seven-plus years have seen just an incredible rejuvenation of energies at NASA leading to more missions within a shorter period of time," says Lori Garver, head of NASA's Office of Policy and Plans.

"In the past the major missions sometimes took a career. Now we're able to excite people, challenge them, infuse new technologies into missions, because they haven't been on the planning books for 10 years," she says.

Now NASA has more research arms than the public can keep up with, with programs to study the origins of the universe, search for life beyond our solar system, invent cutting-edge technologies and develop models to improve the quality of life on Earth.

NASA embraces diversity

In business terms, NASA has diversified.

"Human space flight is not the only game in town at NASA," Garver says. Where most of its budget went to human space flight in the 1960s, only 40 percent now goes to that effort.

"The Mars Pathfinder (landing in 1997) caught everyone's attention," Garver says. "Hubble photos have just captured the public imagination and had maybe more magazine covers than even John Glenn." Glenn, the first American in orbit, returned to space in October aboard the space shuttle.

Part of what helps NASA afford its far-flung ventures despite budget constraints is the very business that Apollo helped to spawn and fertilize

The aerospace industry has thrived, despite and partly because of Department of Defense cutbacks, to the point that private investment in space outstripped government spending two years ago, Garver says.

By contrast, NASA had one focus with its Apollo program: to land humans on the moon and bring them back safely. The six missions that did so returned a wealth of scientific data and almost 400 kilograms (880 pounds) of lunar samples.

"They met the challenge. They met it beautifully," Chaikin says. "The energy that flowed through NASA at that time, the excitement, the adrenaline, it all stemmed from the fact that space had become very crucial to the nation's reputation and strength in the world."

NASA buried in social upheaval

The entire playing field changed after Apollo 11, Chaikin says, due primarily to massive social changes.

"No longer was space at the top of the national priority list," he says. The nation became distracted with the Vietnam War, inflation, environmental concerns and civil rights.

"NASA never really adapted to that new paradigm," Chaikin says. The agency's post-Apollo director, Tom Paine, was a visionary with dreams of a space station, reusable space shuttles and a base on the moon. But it was clear that budgets were shrinking and he was out of luck, Chaikin says. His plans either were scaled down or axed.

"NASA had to adjust to that cruel reality," Chaikin says.

NASA Mission Control during the Apollo 11 mission (top) and today

Socially, NASA also has diversified.

With its healthy 1960s budgets, NASA personnel -- office staffers as well as astronauts -- were able to achieve extraordinary feats.

"The flight controllers, the people who manned the trenches in mission control, these were kids," Chaikin says. "They were in their 20s and 30s. And they were controlling a moon mission."

During the past 30 years, NASA has gone gray. Many of the people designing and heading up modern missions are Apollo veterans. Meanwhile, NASA has gone from about 31,000 employees in 1969 to fewer than 18,000 in 1998.

Many left for the aerospace industry, but relatively little young blood was brought in over the past decade as NASA only recently lifted a hiring freeze, Garvey says. Since 1992, NASA's focus on Goldin's "faster, better, cheaper" credo has resulted in a somewhat more svelte agency that contracts out certain activities, including spacecraft construction and mission control operations.

That strategy has allowed NASA to keep its budget steady in recent years. Its budget for 1999 is $13.6 billion. For comparison, NASA spent a whopping $90 billion for the entire Apollo program in 1990 dollars.

While NASA in 1969 was clearly a "manned" operation, and primarily white, it has started to catch up demographically: About 10 percent of its work force is black and about 4 percent is Hispanic. Women now make up 32 percent of NASA staffers.

Agency loses favor

NASA lost the popularity contest when it comes to taxpayers' dollars and lost its way, some say.

Apollo captured the nation's imagination, with parents waking their children to watch moon landings and pedestrians standing frozen before shop window TVs to follow the latest developments.

Only the building of the Panama Canal rivaled the Apollo program's size as the largest non-military technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States, says Roger Launius of the NASA History Office. In a wartime setting, only the Manhattan Project compares.

Nowadays, despite NASA's best efforts, the public is unaware of most shuttle flights and many of the agency's space exploration missions.

For Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who followed Neil Armstrong onto the moon 30 years ago, NASA is in a sad slump.

"The achievements of Apollo were so bold and our subsequent efforts so timid that the energy of those years seems like a youthful dream," Aldrin told those at a space tourism conference last month.

"Had we continued even with that moderate investment in space, we'd have walked on Mars 10 years ago, or certainly five years ago," he said.

NASA enjoyed its largest budget the year before the first moon landing, Garver says.

Throughout the '70s, NASA budgets were significantly smaller. "We did invest in some of the robotic missions, the Viking mission that went to Mars, and we started developing the space shuttle but at a very low annual rate," Garvey says.

The NASA budget saw a modest peak in 1992 but since has declined slightly each year.

The next Soviet Union

The question for the future is one of motivation.

"What will ever replace the Cold War as a driver and the impetus for doing these big space explorations?" Chaikin asks.

Space tourism and a lunar or planetary version of the California Gold Rush of the 1840s could be the answer. But for now, NASA is at a crossroads, he says.

"I can tell you with some degree of confidence that in the next millennium we'll see human beings walk on other planets and even perhaps go to other stars," Chaikin says.

"But I can't tell you when we'll go back to the moon. I think it'll be in the next 50 years, but I don't know. I sure hope we get space tourism before I get too old."