NASA Future looks uncertain for human spaceflight

The space shuttle fleet has remained grounded.
WASHINGTON POST
PASADENA, Calif. -- Brian Cooper may be the slowest driver in the solar system. Floored, his vehicle reaches a sustained velocity of a tenth of a mile per hour. That's fine with Cooper, who fears getting stuck in the bottom of a crater. On Mars you can't call a tow truck.
On a recent morning, Cooper's vehicle, the rover named Opportunity, stood parked on the downward slope of a crater the size of a football field.
On his computer here at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cooper could see what the rover saw through its stereoscopic cameras. Toward the bottom of the crater, where the surface leveled out, the rocky ground gave way to softer soil. Trouble.
Cooper wanted to tell the rover to take this opportunity to turn the heck around and get out of the crater. But scientists wanted the rover to keep going down, deeper into the planet's geological past. They won the argument.
"I'm just one little voice of caution. Our job is to make sure the rover is safe to drive another day," Cooper said. "We never go fun-truckin'."
He's an engineer, and engineers know better than anyone the limits of their contraptions. He does a great imitation of Scotty from "Star Trek":
"It can't take it ennymore, Cap'n!"
Keeping the dream
The triumphs of two rambling rovers on Mars, as well as the success of the Cassini spacecraft that recently reached Saturn, prove that NASA still knows how to perform magic in space.
But it is simultaneously a traumatized agency, struggling to maintain the dream of the Apollo era. The space shuttle fleet remains grounded as a result of the Columbia disaster. The International Space Station orbits the Earth aimlessly, an expensive contraption that remains unfinished, with two lonely astronauts laboring to keep it from falling apart.
The government, meanwhile, hasn't yet figured out how to keep one of its signature triumphs, the Hubble Space Telescope, from falling back to Earth in a fireball. NASA doesn't want to endanger a crew of astronauts for the sake of an aging instrument that will eventually be replaced by more powerful telescopes.
There is talk of a robotic mission to save the Hubble, but the whole issue has been a public relations disaster for the agency, emanating the whiff of a can't-do attitude.
These were the people who could always do the impossible. They were the ones who inspired a great American clich & eacute;: If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we ...
Taking a chance
Even here at JPL, past disasters keep everyone from feeling overconfident. People know that spaceflight remains a difficult, experimental, chancy line of work.
"The shadow of failure is around the corner all the time," says Charles Elachi, JPL's director.
Robotic spaceflight and space-based astronomy, using a new generation of telescopes, may be the likeliest source of NASA glory for the next decade or so. But space science has never been the central purpose of NASA. NASA has always been powered by the dream that humans, and not just their robotic proxies, will directly explore the universe.
A dream that, right now, looks all too literally fantastic.
There are lots of cosmic questions that NASA would like to answer. Are there oceans under the surface of Jupiter's icy moons? Are there Earthlike planets orbiting distant stars? Where might we find life in the universe?
Future
The robotic program and a new generation of space telescopes will grapple with these mysteries. Space science has a bright future even if human spaceflight has a cloudy one. NASA recently launched a spacecraft toward Mercury.
There are programs under way to send robotic probes to comets, to the moon, to Mars again, past Pluto to the outer edge of the solar system, and to the tantalizing moons of Jupiter.
In roughly a decade, a planned telescope known as the Terrestrial Planet Finder may be able to obtain a direct image of an Earthlike planet in a different solar system.
NASA anticipates retiring the shuttle as soon as the space station is completed. Though the shuttle and station have powerful political allies, they are much derided among space buffs.
Perhaps the private sector will take over what has long been a government monopoly on the human kind of space exploration. There are entrepreneurs who are dying to rocket off the planet.
But space is a harsh environment, alluring but deadly. It may be that biological intelligence will need to give way to artificial intelligence in the exploration of the universe.