There are federal programs that give succor to the old, the sick, and the hungry, that make food supplies and workplaces safer, and that train armies and buy ships and planes to protect friends and overawe enemies. There are programs that chase crooks and put them in jail. There are programs that support schoolteachers, cotton farmers, forest rangers, and AIDS researchers, and even provide stipends for a few stray artists and philosophers. But there is only one federal program that, at its best, reaches for the grandeur and the wonder that in ages past built great cathedrals and launched wooden ships into unknown waters where dragons lurked.

President Bush seemed to be saying something like that last week in his eulogy for the seven astronauts who died February 1st in the flaming arc of the Columbia. "This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire written in the human heart," Bush said. "We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return." Simple words, good words, and, like many of those prepared for this President's formal delivery, graceful words. The five men and two women of the Columbia crew—in background and origin as exhilaratingly varied as the crew-cut flyboys of the early space program were monochromatic—deserved the homely praise he gave them. (And when their ship went down they deserved better than the shopworn kitsch, the therapized bathos, with which the television news factories automatically responded.) They were talented, resourceful people who took on an assignment that they knew was as dangerous as it was glamorous. They were up to the job. But was the job worthy of them?

Thirty winters ago, in December of 1972, Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan returned safely from the moon. They were the eleventh and twelfth men to walk on the surface of an extraterrestrial world; they were also, so far, the last. No one knew it at the time, but the Homeric age of manned space flight was over. With the completion of the Apollo program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration stood at a fork in the road. As President Kennedy in 1961 had committed the nation to sending a man to the moon by the end of the decade, President Nixon could have proclaimed the goal of mounting an expedition to Mars by the end of the century. Technically, that goal was well within our grasp. But the country, mired in Vietnam and descending into Watergate, was in a sour and suspicious mood, and Nixon, despite an overwhelming reëlection victory, was not the man to summon it to starry adventures. Something more practical, more serviceable—something more down to earth—seemed the way to go. So we got the Shuttle.

And there we're stuck. The Shuttle has had its transcendent moments, the greatest of which came in 1993, when it made an ophthalmologic house call on the Hubble Space Telescope and corrected its optical prescription. But, on balance, the Shuttle has been a gigantic mistake. It was a flop well before it became a disaster. Its career has been marked by bad economics, bad science, bad engineering, and bad symbolism.

The Shuttle fleet was supposed to be a safe, reliable workhorse that would make a round trip every week at a cost of ten million dollars each, supplanting disposable rockets and practically paying for itself by doing odd jobs like putting communications satellites into orbit. Instead, until last week it was averaging five trips a year at a half-billion dollars apiece. Single-use rockets, like Europe's Ariane, get most of the routine satellite-launching business. The Shuttle has also been a bust scientifically. Most of its on-board experiments, up to and including the ones carried out by the Columbia crew, could have been done more cheaply and safely by robots on unmanned craft. Robert Park, the public-information director of the American Physical Society, the country's principal professional association of physicists, has said, "There is no experiment that has been done on the space shuttle that has made a significant difference to any field of science."

The Shuttle is a marvel of nineteen-seventies engineering, but this is no longer the nineteen-seventies; it's no longer the nineteen-anythings. The Shuttle does not follow the Macintosh model, whereby software drives hardware and new generations of machines, each exponentially more advanced than the last, roll out annually. It doesn't even follow the Detroit model, whereby you make millions of cars and use what you learn from that repetitive exercise to tweak your product into something familiar but better. The Shuttle follows the Cuban model: hang on to your '57 Chevy, keep it shiny, improvise what spare parts you can, and keep it running forever. The last quasi-serious effort to come up with a successor was downsized last November, when NASA announced that the Shuttle would remain in service until as late as 2020.

The traditional argument against the space program—that the money would be better spent on earthly uplift—posits a dubious zero-sum choice. But the zero-sum analysis does, to some extent, apply within the space program, and there is little doubt that its indisputably worthwhile elements, such as unmanned planetary and astronomical probes, have been pushed partly or wholly into the Shuttle money pit. We could have a fleet of solar sailing vessels plying interplanetary space, returning soil samples from Venus, Mars, and the asteroid belt for laboratory study on Earth. We could have robotic airplanes, balloons, and Jeep-size rovers exploring Mars (which has as much dry land as Earth does). We could have orbiters monitoring changing conditions on a dozen fascinating worlds, from sunbaked Mercury and Jupiter's watery moons Europa and Ganymede to mysterious Neptune and frigid Pluto. We could have ultra-high-resolution space telescopes capable of detecting Earth-like planets orbiting other stars. We have none of these.

There should be manned space travel, but it should be worth the candle. We could have said, "Let's go to Mars." Instead we said, "Let's make space travel banal and pointlessly dangerous by sending people into low Earth orbit, over and over, decade after decade, until too many of them get killed." Actually, we did have a President once who proposed a Mars mission. George H. W. Bush—how we miss him!—put it this way, in 1989, in his trademark style: "For the new century, back to the moon. Back to the future. And, this time, back to stay. And then a journey into tomorrow. A journey to another planet. A manned mission to Mars." ("Long way away. Fulla Martians. Don't care. Gonna do it," he did not add.) Unfortunately, Bush, Sr., was vague about how or when this might be done, and his ringing call soon faded into nothingness. His son—whose incuriosity in these matters is such that until last week he had never in his life visited the Johnson Space Center, in Houston—is not likely to repeat the call, much less find the money, amid wars and tax cuts, to carry it out. The day will come, but it will have to await a leader of vision, someday, in the far future.