At NASA, dilemmas of transformation

From the outside, Building 29 looks like every other boxy 1960s structure on the Johnson Space Center campus. But inside is NASA's newest goal: Mars - or a rough reproduction of it.

The Mars Room, as it is informally known, has habitation modules, greenhouses, even a model of the planet's surface - complete with volcanic dust imported from Hawaii. And since President Bush announced a return to the moon and a manned trip to Mars earlier this month, this otherworldly room has taken on new meaning.

Experts agree that the president's plan comes, in part, as a response to the Columbia disaster, when the shuttle disintegrated over east Texas one year ago next week and shook the space community to its core.

In its report, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that a decades-long lack of strategic vision contributed to the tragedy. Now Bush has provided that vision - a bold return to manned spaceflight, first to the the moon and then, perhaps, to Mars. But the goal is hardly without controversy - within NASA as well as without. It's raising questions of cost for an agency that seems perennially short on funds. And it could revive a decades-old tension between devotees of manned spaceflight and advocates of pure science. In short, by trying to rejuvenate the agency, Bush may in fact be stirring a deeper divide over NASA's most suitable role in the 21st century.

The first question, of course, is a technical one: Can the US, even with all of its technical prowess, actually put a man on Mars? "It can be done," says Howard McCurdy, a space historian at American University in Washington. "But do the odds favor it? No." He points to old problems of mismanagement and wasteful spending as NASA's classic pitfalls.

Making Mars a reality would require turning the space agency into a powerhouse of discipline and management - the likes of which haven't been seen since the 1960s, says Dr. McCurdy.

To supporters, Bush's plan allows allows for just such a rehaul. But nearly everyone cautions that a NASA revolution will bring casualties along with triumphs.

"NASA has been directed to make space exploration its central mission, and that provides NASA management a tool to enforce discipline," says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington and a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. "So, yes, there will be losers as well as winners within the organization."

The most recent example of a loser: the Hubble Space Telescope, which revolutionized the study of the cosmos and forced the rewriting of astronomy texts.

Two days after Bush ordered the space agency to cut $11 billion for its five-year budget, NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe announced the winding down of the Hubble program - in favor of sending humans back to the moon, Mars, "and beyond."

Other NASA casualties include the shuttle program and the International Space Station.

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