Is the right stuff now lost in space?

Political calculations
John McCain and Barack Obama, who have similar space policies, both want to shorten the gap in spaceflight that follows the end of the shuttle program. They support the general idea of going back to the moon, but whoever wins the election will probably re-examine current plans, experts said.

Meanwhile, NASA leaders must contend with a dissident team of employees and contractors who have so little faith in the chosen design for the new moon rocket that they are working on their own time on a cheaper alternative.

Because of all these issues, the space agency's own quasi-independent safety panel warned this summer of an unusual sense of anxiety among workers.

Perhaps adding to frustrations, NASA announced Monday that its high-profile mission in October to repair the Hubble Space Telescope was delayed until next year because of an unexpected glitch in the orbiting telescope.

A new moon race?
On top of all that, China is becoming a new space competitor. Chinese astronauts took a spacewalk on Saturday, and the head of the Chinese space agency said he plans to send astronauts to the moon "in the near future." A new moon race could be on.

"There's a lot of problems NASA has at middle age. It's being asked to do too much," said Syracuse University public policy professor Henry Lambright. "It's unrealistic to expect you to carry on this burden of the past, the shuttle and the space station, while you do something new without more money. You can't do it."

Suggesting NASA is having a mere midlife crisis is sugarcoating the situation, said Hans Mark, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas who was a NASA administrator during the Reagan administration.

"It's not a midlife crisis. It's a disaster," Mark said. "We can't possibly give up on the shuttle and let Russians be the only ones get to the space station. We don't have a higher-tech replacement for the shuttle, and we screwed up the space station" by putting it in an orbit that prevents it from being useful for missions to the moon or Mars.

Wayne Hale, NASA's deputy associate administrator, tried to put the situation in the best light.

"We are at a crossroads," Hale said, noting the future could be viewed as dangerous or an opportunity.

"If we had done things the way we wish we could have, we wouldn't be here," Hale said. "But here we are... It's a shame we got in this situation."

John Logsdon, a space policy expert at the National Air and Space Museum, said: "NASA at 50 is still suffering from a decision made when it was 12."

During the race to the moon, NASA got special treatment, essentially getting a blank check during the Kennedy space race era. In 1970, President Nixon ruled it would be treated like all other federal agencies, and "NASA has been in the midst of a perpetual crisis ever since," Logsdon said.

These days a new attitude is called for from an agency that began as risk-taking one that raced the Russians. As Hale put it, NASA must become "more mature."

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