On April 12th, 1961, the Soviet Union, already first into space with the 1957 launch of their Sputnik satellite, scored another impressive first in the space race, announcing to a shocked world that they had succeeded in putting Major Yuri Gagarin into orbit and returning him safely to Earth. Although Alan Shepard became the first American in space on a short flight only a few weeks later, it would be ten months before NASA could equal the Russian feat by putting John Glenn into orbit. But from that point on, the space race was ours, culminating in the historic moon landings of the Apollo program.

It was a time of justifiable American pride, and NASA was seen as the image of all that was best about our nation. But as we begin the second half-century of manned space exploration, many say that NASA’s best days are far behind it. Sadly, I think that’s probably true. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For the record, I am a huge fan of space exploration. I was born in the midst of the Mercury program, and grew up watching the successes of the Gemini and Apollo years. Like many boys in the days of the space race, I aspired to be an astronaut for a while, but I even went so far as to become a Navy pilot with that goal in mind. A friend from college succeeded in achieving the dream; he joined NASA, and eventually flew three shuttle missions.

So it pains me to say that, frankly, NASA lost its way after the moon. Those early days had been full of the “can-do” military spirit brought by its original fighter pilot astronauts, teamed with engineers stretching the boundaries of technology and human ability. But by the mid-‘70s, this had been replaced by a more prosaic and pragmatic atmosphere. Congress, already bored of the miracle of men walking on the moon, canceled funding for the final three missions. NASA settled into a more cautious and calculated approach less defined by fighter-jock bravado than by administrators and politicians in conference rooms poring over spreadsheets and press releases. Washington increasingly saw NASA as just another government program through which billions of dollars of largess could be bestowed on friendly corporations and constituencies. The exuberant “We have a lift-off!” that had followed Apollo countdowns was replaced by bland prepared statements written by the PR department.

It was this kind of thinking that gave us the space shuttle, NASA’s face to the public for the past 35 years. Don’t get me wrong, the shuttle is a remarkable piece of engineering. But it never even came close to meeting the stated goal of making spaceflight cheap and even commonplace. After two final launches later this year, the surviving four shuttles will be retired to museums with that goal still unmet.

Unfortunately, the space shuttle somewhat reflected a designed-by-committee compromise. Discarding a large external fuel tank to burn up in the atmosphere was always massively wasteful (some original designs had called for a fully-reusable manned booster.) The solid-fuel boosters (which are uncontrollable once lit) were often troublesome, as were the ceramic tiles of the heat shield (I wonder what Werner von Braun would have thought of a launching a spacecraft covered in bricks!) Problems with each eventually led to the loss of a ship and crew.

But the main trouble with the space shuttle was not one of engineering or design; it’s that it never really had a mission, at least not one that didn’t smack of “make-work” rationalization. It’s been great for satellite launches, but putting satellites in orbit was old news 20 years before the first shuttle launch, and can still be done better and more cheaply by unmanned rockets. Similarly, while the shuttle allowed a lot of low-orbit observation of our planet, that’s more easily and inexpensively done by satellites. And it allowed somewhat longer stays in space for crews, but never of the length already achieved by the crews on the Skylab station, or the Soviet Mir and Salyut stations.

Where the shuttle fleet has shined, however, has been in getting up to the International Space Station; nothing else currently available can take as many crewmen up there in a single launch. And of course, the shuttles have carried the lion’s share of the station’s components into orbit, as well as the astronauts who did the assembly. So there we have it: the shuttle is our primary transportation to the International Space Station.

But ultimately, what’s the main purpose of the ISS? To give the shuttle a place to go, and a job to do. A “bridge to nowhere” indeed! Circular logic costing hundreds of billions, while we have puttered around in low orbit around for four decades rather than building on our Apollo lunar successes.

The kind of drive that allowed us to put a man on the moon only eight years after JFK proposed it just doesn’t exist in government any more, and probably can’t. Governments cannot afford big failures, which are expensive both financially and in terms of public opinion. NASA barely survived the loss of two shuttles, and a significant portion of each flight to the ISS is now dedicated to examining the shuttle that brought them there, simply to ensure that the aging craft has not been so damaged during launch that it cannot safely return, lest a third disaster finally shut down the agency.

The timetable for a return to the moon is now in doubt, after President Obama last year cancelled the Orion program that would have taken us back for the first time since 1972 (although “reaching out to the Muslim world” presumably remains a “foremost objective” of NASA.) A manned mission to Mars, confidently predicted for the late 1980s or early 1990s by Apollo-era planners, has been pushed back to sometime in the latter half of this century. In these days of trillion-dollar borrowing, there’s just no spirit for the kind of spending that space exploration requires.

But perhaps that kind of thinking SHOULDN’T have a place in government anymore. Is it right to spend billions of tax dollars on a purpose with no Constitutional authority? Should it be acceptable to risk losing all that money on a spectacular failure that will only serve to diminish our nation in the eyes of others? Leave it to the entrepreneur and to private industry, which can make the free choice to stake their own capital and image on great adventures. Only there can or should great risks be taken, led by the lure of the great rewards which NASA has shown are available in space.

Remember, the Lewis and Clark expedition was a government-financed mission of exploration, a wonderful first step in seeing what awaited us in the unknown western regions of North America. But it was not teams sent by Washington that opened up the West, but families in Conestoga wagons, seeking new adventures and new opportunities.

NASA served its day and our nation with distinction, with successes that inspired people across the planet. The names of NASA luminaries like Shepard, Glenn, Lovell, and Armstrong will be remembered through the centuries, as will those of their Soviet counterparts like Gagarin, Popovich, Tereshkova, and Leonov.

But the future of space exploration will and should belong to the people, the private citizens who will choose on their own to go there, to risk much and gain more. You’ve done well, NASA. But now comes the next phase…