MISSION MOON: Nearly 50 years have passed since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. Our special Apollo 50 anniversary coverage explores how the country came together to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s goal of reaching the lunar surface by 1970, NASA's bold missions - and crippling tragedies - since that historic day, and the future of space exploration and Houston as America's "Space City.”

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Before NASA launched humans into space, scientists agonized over all the things that could go wrong.

Some theorized microgravity would blind astronauts. Others worried spaceflight would stop their hearts. Yet another concern at the agency was “ space madness ,” a phenomenon allegedly similar to cabin fever that never came about.

“There were all sorts of speculations that human space travel might not even be possible,” said Jack Burns, director of the Network for Exploration and Space Science, a NASA-funded venture at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Without fully knowing it was possible for humans to survive in space, Burns said, NASA sent them there anyway.

In the 1960s, the agency’s penchant for taking space exploration risks was boosted by a virtual blank check from Congress, a furious nationwide desire to beat the Russians to the moon and a directive to get there from President John F. Kennedy — a vision his successors saw through several years after his death.

Half a century later, experts say, Congress shows skepticism when the agency asks lawmakers to fund its most ambitious projects, while the space race has given way to international cooperation, reducing the sense of competitive urgency. And instead of a vision spanning four administrations, space policy changes from president to president, Burns said, injecting further caution into the agency.

“Politicians, and NASA for that matter, and the American public all have gotten much more conservative or risk-averse than a space program really requires,” Burns said.

Changing expectations

Some of the limitations can be traced to a lack of funding. From 1960 to 1973, NASA spent $19.4 billion on its Apollo program, a 2009 congressional analysis found, amounting to about $116.5 billion today. The agency’s share of total U.S. spending reached almost 4.5 percent in 1966, compared with about half a percent today.

Not every elected official has lost the appetite for space travel, though. President Donald Trump has established an ambitious space exploration agenda, directing NASA in March to push its trip to the moon up four years, from 2028 to 2024. He recently asked Congress for an extra $1.6 billion in the agency’s annual budget — paid for by a surplus in Pell Grant funds — to start developing a lunar lander and speed the development of the Orion spacecraft and NASA’s Space Launch System, which is set to become the most powerful rocket ever.

Trump’s directive marks a break from former President Barack Obama’s tendency to focus on long-term goals for NASA, such as reaching Mars by 2030, without pursuing a return to the moon. Even Obama’s Mars timeline now appears ambitious, with NASA officials tentatively aiming to send humans to Mars in 2033 — a target they admit is aggressive.

By the numbers $601.1 billion Total amount spent on NASA since its inception $1.32 trillion Total amount spent on NASA since its inception, when adjusted for inflation $22.03 billion Average spending per year on NASA since its inception $21.5 billion NASA’s budget for the current fiscal year 0.49 percent — Percentage of the current 4.4 trillion federal budget spent on NASA 4.41 percent — Percentage of the federal budget spent on NASA at its peak in 1966 Source: U.S. Office of Management and Budget

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If anything, NASA may be making one of its riskiest gambits yet by relying on Russia’s Soyuz rockets to reach the International Space Station. The situation has drawn the ire of U.S. Rep. Brian Babin, a Woodville Republican whose district includes the Johnson Space Center. Russia has used access to the space station as a bargaining chip at times, threatening to bar the U.S.

Babin, the ranking member on the House space subcommittee, has said that NASA should regain the ability to launch “American astronauts on American rockets from American soil” to the space station. He also has questioned whether the U.S. should continue funding the space station, which is projected to cost $3 to $4 billion annually through 2024, the last year of spending authorization.

“We ought to be aware that remaining on the ISS will come at a cost,” Babin said at a 2017 hearing during which lawmakers considered whether to continue ISS funding. “That cost means trade-offs with other NASA priorities. What opportunities will we miss if we maintain the status quo?”

Attempts to de-politicize

Lawmakers and experts generally agree that the dearth of grandiose projects at NASA, or the delays and setbacks on the ones that exist, stem in large part from a lack of continuity between presidential administrations. Under President George W. Bush, NASA aimed to reach the moon as a steppingstone for a mission to Mars. Obama ended that project, then Trump redirected the agency back to the moon.

Former Congressman John Culberson, a Republican who lost re-election in 2018, blamed the Obama administration for not seeing through Bush’s Constellation program, citing the “heartbreak for all the wonderful engineers and scientists” at NASA.

“It was catastrophic,” Culberson said.

Culberson, who chaired the appropriations subcommittee that oversees NASA, at one point proposed to help solve the continuity problem by setting the NASA administrator’s term at 10 years. The proposal, which never passed, was an attempt to de-politicize NASA and maintain stability between administrations, Culberson said.

Burns said he has heard people who work at NASA say they would recognize when a project was destined to come to an end under a new administration and decide to “just wait it out.”

“We need to establish a space program that will be broad enough to be sustainable over multiple administrations,” said Burns, who served on Trump’s NASA transition team. “That is, we need to make a strong enough case that the moon is the first step, the steppingstone, to other parts of the solar system, to asteroids and to Mars, such that over the next 20, 30, 40 years, that kind of thing is maintained, rather than every 4 or 8 years we switch gears. That’s extremely harmful.”

jasper.scherer@chron.com