Above: Visitors on a bus tour make a stop at the historic Redstone test site, a National Historic Landmark at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

Over the remainder of 2014 science writer Eric Berger and photographer Smiley Pool will look at the collapse of the Constellation program, Congressional infighting for funds, shifting priorities of successive White House administrations, the promise of private space companies and, ultimately, the fate of Houston as Space City.

This is the second story in a series that will look at the state of America’s space program. In this installment, we examine NASA’s efforts to build and fly a heavy-lift rocket in a time of constrained budgets.

NASA’s new rocket drives ambition, fuels doubt

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Todd May’s corner office overlooks the tree-lined hills where Wernher von Braun made the most powerful rockets the world has ever known.

Just down the road stands a massive building, taller than a football field is long, where von Braun’s mighty Saturn V rocket underwent tests ahead of its triumphant lunar destiny. Atop another rise there’s a rickety looking tower where, as NASA desperately sought to keep pace with the Russians, von Braun tested a modified missile that carried the first American into space.

These and other historic Apollo buildings at Marshall Space Flight Center remain today, rusted reminders that once, long ago, Alabama rocketry made the world stand at attention.

Though barely out of diapers during the lunar landings, May soaked them up. Later he would discover talents similar to von Braun, a genius for organizing the work of engineers and a passion for spaceflight. And now May finds himself designing a rocket that could become even larger than von Braun’s Saturn V.

One day this spring, as verdant green spread across the Appalachian foothills beyond his windows, May spoke in a sonorous Southern accent of his conviction that the seeds of NASA’s spaceflight renaissance are being planted right here and right now.

“I believe in what we’re trying to do here,” he said. “And I believe that we are bringing a revolutionary capability to the world.”

The Space Launch System, or SLS, is the seed - a super-sized rocket NASA hasn't had in decades. If everything goes right for May, NASA can build this rocket that can again take humans beyond low-Earth orbit where they have remained confined for 40 years. The catch is this: Washington isn’t giving NASA nearly enough money to actually do this.

The task of rocket building gobbles up so much of NASA’s meager exploration budget there’s no money left to develop payloads; the spacecraft, the living quarters, rovers or all of the stuff NASA needs if it wants to send humans to the moon, the surface of an asteroid or Mars.

For this reason critics, and there are many, have dubbed the SLS a “rocket to nowhere.”

May doesn’t believe it’s a rocket to nowhere. And neither do the hundreds of engineers, many of them children of Apollo who followed their dreams to Marshall and NASA’s other nine field centers scattered around the country.

And critics be damned, May’s rocket is being built.

Likely sometime this month Charles Bolden, the space agency’s administrator, is expected to formally switch the program from its “formulation” stage into “implementation,” a Rubicon of sorts known as Key Decision Point-C.

To date NASA has spent only about 30 percent of the SLS’s estimated $9 billion development cost. Bolden’s decision will greenlight spending the rest.

When that happens it will further cement May’s place as a modern-day von Braun. But unlike von Braun, the Nazi who built the V2 rocket and surrendered to the Americans as a prized captive, May is a native Southerner. Asked why NASA should explore space, he jests in a faux redneck accent, “Murica! Murica is founded on guns and exploration.”

Growing up he’d visit his grandfather, on the northern Gulf of Mexico coast, and watch lunar eclipses from the beach while recalling Apollo.

His, then, are Southern roots that run as deep as those of Huntsville, the sleepy cotton town that improbably became “Rocket City” after von Braun and his German rocket scientists moved here in 1950. Initially the Germans built missiles for the U.S. Army, but that changed in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik 1 satellite into orbit.

America turned to von Braun and he delivered by launching the Explorer 1 satellite. Later in 1958 President Eisenhower signed the law that created NASA and based its rocket operations at what would become known as Marshall Space Flight Center.